Small fires were still smoldering under the rubble of the Pentagon crash site when President George Bush’s senior staff approached Congress for emergency money for cleanup and retaliation. The first request was bolder than anything anyone on Capitol Hill could ever remember receiving: “… and such sums as necessary for an indefinite period of time.” Scott Lilly, then Democratic minority staff director for the House Appropriations Committee, which under law helps Congress decide what executive branch programs to fund and in what amount, likened the first post-9/11 supplemental budget to “a repeal of the Constitution.” While the committee members knew the administration would have to come back to them for more money, in the dazed shock that followed the attacks, no one questioned that a war against al-Qaeda would necessarily involve a massive infusion of funds.
Negotiations were brief, given the nation’s state. Emergency preparations to respond to another attack were under way throughout Washington and it was considered unsafe to be on Capitol Hill, rumored to be the one target al-Qaeda had missed that day. Authorities had quickly simulated what various types of explosives would do to the nation’s most recognizable buildings. In the case of the Capitol, of particular concern were the panes of nineteenth-century glass. One powerful bomb could easily cause three thousand deaths as a result of the shrapnel of flying glass. Other scenarios were just as devastating and prompted the closing of streets around the area.
In a matter of days, a bipartisan group of leaders approved an additional $40 billion—two-thirds of total federal spending for education that year and twice as much as Bush had ended up requesting—to counter the attack. Wisconsin representative David R. Obey, Lilly’s boss and the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, called the measure “a down payment” on a “long twilight struggle against terrorism. This is going to be a very nasty enterprise.”
Less than three weeks later, by the end of the month, congressional leaders approved another $40 billion. Some of the money was devoted to quickly reconstructing the Pentagon, and cleaning up the World Trade Center site, as well as to fortifying the Capitol and other federal buildings. “We were single-minded,” said Jim Dyer, Republican House Appropriations Committee staff director. “We were going to show the bad guys how quickly we could respond, that we were strong enough to take a hit and bounce right back.”
Three weeks later, envelopes of deadly anthrax emptied the Capitol and adjoining office buildings. Members and staff of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, locked out of their offices, spent their days at the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Energy, and the other agencies that were most immediately involved in the response. The displaced House Appropriations members added items not on the White House list: protection for the Statue of Liberty; a remote backup computer server site for the FBI, which had none at the time; preparation for mass vaccine production; more equipment and personnel for the National Security Agency (NSA), the nation’s electronic surveillance agency;1 and much more money for domestic nuclear security. The list, anxiously compiled, was long. By December, Congress passed another supplemental spending bill. Supplementals are funds not included in the normal fiscal year budget of any department, and they would become a way of life for the federal government following the 2001 attacks. When the buildup to the war in Iraq began just a year later, massive infusions of cash again were requested and approved. Much of the new money, on top of the already existing multi-billion-dollar budgets of the intelligence community and the military agencies, went into classified budget annexes under a new catch-all category called “GWOT” (pronounced Gee-Watt), for the Global War on Terror.2 Given the fact that the country was now actively at war in Afghanistan, barely a member could speak out against more GWOT funds. “These were massive amounts no one could check,” said Lilly. “It got so huge it overwhelmed the system. There was no way we could keep track of it. You’d no sooner be finished with one bill and you’d be given a request for a supplemental.” Keeping tabs on the deluge of money was all the harder because much of the spending was also hidden from public view in what became a routine classified no-man’s-land dealing with counterterrorism and homeland security, where it remains today.
The expansion of the classified portion of the federal budget reflected what was happening in the operations of the defense and intelligence agencies. On September 17, Bush signed a nearly open-ended Presidential Finding,3 a document legally required in order to authorize covert activities by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. (The term covert—as opposed to clandestine or secret—means the activities are supposed to remain concealed so that the United States could plausibly deny its involvement if necessary. Clandestine and secret activities are concealed, but, if they are discovered, their U.S. sponsorship can be acknowledged. Under law, military operations, even the most carefully concealed, are not meant to be covert.)4 As reported first by Bob Woodward for the Washington Post, Bush’s Presidential Finding on al-Qaeda directed the CIA to undertake the most sweeping and lethal covert action since the agency was founded in 1947. The objective was to attack bin Laden’s organization and to kill or capture those responsible for the 9/11 attacks and their supporters. Bush immediately gave the agency $1 billion and instructed the military to help the CIA in any way it could.
From the Presidential Finding grew dozens of frenzied programs to beef up the spy agency’s paramilitary capabilities and support infrastructure around Afghanistan. Each one of them flew by the desk of John Rizzo, the CIA senior deputy legal counsel, for review.
“There was a flood of money and also a flood of authorities, a flood of responsibilities that we were directed to undertake, obviously immediately,” said Rizzo, who by then had already spent a quarter-century at the agency. “It overwhelmed the infrastructure that was in place.”
I had met Bill Arkin ten years before, during a much simpler operation: Desert Storm, the 1991 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the first Gulf War. Arkin was a meticulous chronicler of the military and the national security establishment, writing about the nuclear arms race during the cold war and, later, about the airpower era of the 1990s. He conducted assessments on the ground in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia and then persuaded the air force to give him detailed bomb damage assessment data to develop authoritative accounts of accidental civilian deaths, known as collateral damage, inflicted during air campaigns.
From his converted office barn in Vermont, the former army intelligence analyst wrote books on how to research the military and how to use the Internet to unearth government secrets. In the 1980s, using only publicly available information, such as telephone books, Arkin had located the secret U.S. nuclear weapons sites in Europe, infuriating the Defense Department and causing a firestorm in Europe but also showing the government what a poor job it did keeping secrets.
To understand any national security question, he collected and cataloged troves of documents: budgets, contracts, military directives, program descriptions, hearing transcripts, job listings, phone directories, audits, and a brain-pickling list of other sources.
Shortly after September 11, Arkin began to notice numerous changes in the budgets, hearings, and military directives he had discovered. Colorfully random two-word titles began to appear, nonsensical phrases like Busy Lobster, Fervent Archer, and Scarlet Cloud. The names of military operations, such as Brave Warrior, Justice Assured, and Freedom Eagle, all made a statement about political purpose and resolve. But Titrant Ranger? What did that mean?
Arkin’s way of dealing with this proliferation of code names was to pull them into detailed computer files and study them as a whole. He had collected more than 3,500 of these odd phrases. To analyze them, he created a three-tiered classification system, a secrecy pyramid. At the base were designations that he already knew, and which were commonly used nicknames for military exercises and hardware and the like, phrases like Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom. The next level contained classified names that could only be vaguely definable by cross-referencing them with a budget line, a contract, a cryptically written directive. (Anything associated with the Nimble Elder program, for example, turned out to have something to do with weapons of mass destruction and counterterrorism.) Then there was the upper layer, the 5 percent of names that appeared rarely and without any description and were probably associated with the most secret and compartmentalized activities.
After years of analysis, Arkin figured that his voluminous research on code names had excavated only the tip of the pyramid, but he was still surprised at the number of new code names that were being manufactured every day. As he began matching code names to other references he had kept over the years, he discovered a giant flaw in the government’s security system. A lot of the code names, even those near the top of the secrecy pyramid, showed up in the descriptions on job-listing websites of positions available to candidates who held security clearances. He was surprised, and delighted, to see classified NSA program names among them, such as this first job announcement he collected from the Windermere Group, an obscure intelligence consulting company, which was looking for a “Senior Analytic Support Specialist” based in Columbia, Maryland, to work on “at least two of the following: ANCHORY, OCTAVE, SKYWRITER, SEMESTER, JAGUAR, ARCVIEW, e-WorkSpace, PINWALE, or HOMEBASE.”
As massive online job boards such as Monster.com replaced job listings that had appeared in newspapers, an astonishing number of these notices became searchable in their totality for the first time. Arkin began to catalog from four hundred to six hundred new job postings a day from the federal government and private companies looking for top secret–cleared workers with very specific skill sets. At any one time, he could find as many as 15,000 listings for very specialized positions that required a top secret clearance. Between 2006 and 2010 he cataloged 182,000 such job announcements in his files. As he did so, Arkin started to count government organizations and private companies working at the “secret” level of classification. Something is classified secret5 if its unauthorized disclosure would cause “serious damage” to national security. For instance, many of the State Department cables published by WikiLeaks are classified secret because they provide candid assessments of foreign leaders and agreements. Routine field reports from military units are also classified secret on the theory that they might provide useful tidbits to an enemy. He was quickly overwhelmed by the volume. There were simply too many organizations and companies to track. Had he been looking prior to September 11, he would have expected to see evidence of a significant number of such programs, but the post-9/11 quantity was mind-boggling.
Given the huge number of secret programs, he decided to track only those classified top secret. A classification of top secret6 meant that public disclosure would lead to “exceptionally grave harm” to national security. The classification generally went to intelligence sources and special capabilities, particularly those involving nuclear weapons or special operations. Top secret information might reveal sources who were secretly passing information to U.S. authorities, or sophisticated technologies used to listen in on the conversations of adversaries, or the content of those conversations. Virtually everything concerning spy satellites and the methods of NSA monitoring is classified top secret, whereas most of what the conventional military does during war is classified secret. Cross-referencing and reading the fine print of job announcements in the summer of 2008, when we first joined forces, he had a list of two hundred companies that did top secret work; several weeks later he had five hundred—and not just their names but their addresses, as well as specific program titles and descriptions that corresponded with those locations.
Code names linked companies and agencies and activities, and the number of locations doubled again, quadrupled, and then doubled again. Unknown locations appeared; obscure agencies emerged; organizations that neither Arkin nor I had ever heard of went from the few to the dozens to the scores.
As the focus shifted to organizations, Arkin shifted much of his research to contracts. All that money meant that the government was also the nation’s largest buyer. It purchased things, from toilet paper to computer equipment to the niftiest surveillance devices and drones. It contracted for services, from architectural design and construction to intelligence analysis, and augmented staff for even the most sensitive activities. The most secret would use cover names and intermediaries, but Arkin matched addresses and phone numbers and fake names on government procurement announcements, he found out how the agencies purchased their fuel oil and electricity, and he was able to map a full picture of the life and diet of a giant, growing entity.
The bloom of code names and job listings and addresses wasn’t meaningful just for its own sake but for something much larger. Just as the most significant thing about a spiking count of white blood cells was what the blood test couldn’t see—the infection that prompted the white cells to multiply in the first place—the top secret jobs and companies, and the government organizations they worked for, pointed to something unprecedented that had yet to be identified in the body politic. We call this Top Secret America.