The thirty-three secure phones ringing all morning in the FBI’s tactical command center went silent just seconds after ten o’clock as Barack Obama spoke the last words of that famous promise to the nation, “so help me God.” John G. Perren, the special agent in charge, felt like someone had shut off the power in the windowless room of frenzied agents and blinking monitors. The whole city fell quiet. He exhaled one long breath. The United States of America had a new president.
It was an historic day for obvious reasons. The first black man to be elected president was being sworn in, and the largest number of people ever to assemble for a presidential inauguration had come to witness it. They drove, were bused in, took the subway, and walked—marched, really—on streets and over bridges that were supposed to be closed to foot traffic. If ever there was a people’s inaugural, this was it, and nothing was going to stop the celebrating, not police barricades, not the numbing cold and wind, not warnings about terrorists. Despite the weight of two long wars, the building economic recession, and a particularly bitter and growing divide between political party leaders, here was an act that transcended these realities: the peaceful transition of power in the most powerful country on earth.
Even for Perren, who, at the age of fifty-five, had been dealing with hardened criminals and terrorists for three decades, it was an emotional moment. It didn’t matter whom he had voted for, or that he was empowered to carry a gun and to know secrets most Americans would never know. At this moment, his allegiance passed instantly to the new chief executive. He was proud of this fact as he watched Obama address an audience that was likewise full of emotion. As he so often did, he thought about people who wanted to do America wrong, about terrorists who sought to undermine its openness and force it to become a fortress, to become something other than what it was. This is an open society, eat your heart out, Perren thought to himself. This is how it happens here.
In his pride, Perren ignored what he was certainly in a better position than most people to understand: al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks almost a decade earlier, and the response to them by the United States, had in fact changed his country profoundly, and even now was continuing to skew it in directions that few could assess or even track with any accuracy.
The American government’s view seemed to be that no action, no program, no buildup of forces abroad or at home was sufficient, nothing we had devised thus far was ever enough to protect us from another 9/11 attack. Nor was any expense too great to prevent smaller attacks. Perren’s FBI, which had witnessed thousands of innocent bystanders die in ugly gangland slayings, Mafia turf wars, and battles between drug lords over the decades, was now also responsible for stopping every person in the United States—citizen or foreign—who was crazy enough to bomb a building, blow up a bridge, or shoot another human being in the name of what was now universally labeled terrorism. As a result, the FBI’s counterterrorism structure had grown three times larger than it had been before 9/11. Straitlaced criminal investigators whose goal in life had been to send bank robbers to prison—the sooner, the better—were now trying to turn themselves into spies and the FBI into a domestic intelligence agency that monitored more and more people—with all the appropriate legal authority, of course.
In the refashioned FBI, agents were no longer supposed to be concerned only with gathering evidence to produce court cases and send criminals to jail. With little or no training, they had been forced to become intelligence collectors, too: to watch patiently, not jump too soon, to follow possible terrorists as they developed plots, recruited comrades, and unknowingly revealed the source of their financial support. They were supposed to keep track of people even thinking about hatching terrorist plots, and often they helped them turn their fantasies into near-realities with sting operations that included phony al-Qaeda followers and fake bombs. Counterterrorism units took advantage of new technologies to investigate suspects—and people who were not yet suspects—in a dozen new ways. The agency’s computers constantly churned, looking for anomalous blips in a sea of data that might represent something nefarious. And although the FBI had the lead on terrorist investigations within the United States, every federal and state agency—including the largest by far, the U.S. military—was trying to get a piece of the action, not only to save the country from terrorism but also so each could grow bigger and more powerful in the process.
By the time of Barack Obama’s inauguration, the entire U.S. counterterrorism apparatus had become gigantic, which left a lot less money for other things, like education or health care for indigent kids or badly needed repair of the American civil infrastructure. The national debt soared, and with it America’s indebtedness to potentially hostile foreign nations. But Americans seemed willing again and again to make this trade-off, since they kept electing people who said they would spend whatever it took to stop terrorism in this frightening post-9/11 decade. As a result, the massive tangle of counterterrorism agencies, programs, bureaus, bunkers, sensors, and security cameras would expand during the Obama years too. Americans couldn’t tell what they were getting for their money, but they could be assured that whatever it was, there was a lot of it—at least $81 billion a year’s worth just for national intelligence, according to the government’s own, if incomplete, count.
As Obama stood at the podium at the base of the U.S. Capitol, he faced a sea of hopeful citizens stretching well beyond the towering figure of President Abraham Lincoln, watching from his giant marble memorial at the end of the National Mall. But between the new young leader and his supporters were five tons of bulletproof glass, and beyond that 20,000 uniformed guards and 25,000 law enforcement officers enveloping him in a security blanket that spanned from New York to West Virginia. Beyond that, an invisible classified universe of top secret agencies and programs and weapons systems and surveillance capabilities and legal authorities and strike forces and pursuit teams assembled to keep him safe, all part of an intelligence-military-corporate apparatus created to keep the nation’s citizens safe, too.
Perren, who resembled the television detective Kojak, was among the most experienced of these top secret guardians in government service. As such, he was part of a cadre of one hundred or so veteran law enforcement, intelligence, and military officers who were still on the job, planning and executing the takedown of Middle Eastern terrorists since their first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Eight years later, as head of the FBI’s counterterrorism office in the nation’s capital, he had supervised the recovery of bodies and evidence from the smoldering Pentagon, and then had deployed to Iraq to oversee FBI law enforcement assistance to the massive counterterrorism operations in that combat zone.
After his quick pause to reflect on the historical moment, Perren went back to his task of keeping the new president and his supporters safe. His job that day was to track everything trackable within the FBI’s authority: incoming foreign intelligence reports transmitted through CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, intercepts and wiretaps, undercover intelligence squads mingling in the crowds, chemical weapons teams collecting air samples, sharpshooters with high-powered telescopes stationed miles away along I-95 North and I-95 South to spot anything unusual heading into the nation’s capital.
He, and the FBI, were not, of course, alone: with the U.S. Secret Service in the lead for the inauguration, fifty-six federal, state, and local agencies drew on their most sophisticated technology and skilled personnel. Bomb squads and HAZMAT units from a dozen organizations were ready to deploy, as were SWAT teams, crisis negotiators, and even behavioral analysts to scour intelligence and news reports for hints of trouble. Automatic license plate readers recorded and checked the license plate numbers of virtually every vehicle nearing Washington, DC, from incoming routes through Virginia and Maryland. Even particles of dust floating throughout the city were captured and analyzed at split-second intervals by navy plume assessment teams and the Department of Homeland Security’s pathogen detectors, mounted onto standard air-quality monitors to sniff out anthrax, tularemia, and other deadly substances. The local Washington government had squirreled away nearly a million respirators and over 2.5 million surgical masks for medical personnel in case of an outbreak.
To facilitate the massive surge in cell phone calls to and from the nearly two million people on the Mall, private telecommunications companies had placed mobile cellular towers throughout downtown. Government disaster experts also positioned and readied their own mobile command centers and special equipment needed to erect an alternative government-only cell phone system should the civil networks go down or electrical power go dark. Emergency relocation facilities outside Washington were readied, as planes, helicopters, SUVs, and quick reaction military forces stood by to evacuate key government leaders, if the need arose.
As all this was going on, dive teams and Coast Guard boats patrolled the Potomac and Anacostia rivers while, overhead, layers of aircraft capped the largest protective bubble in the world: Air Force F-22 Raptor fighters and Air National Guard RC-26 surveillance aircraft flew above Customs and Border Patrol Blackhawk helicopters, while even higher, surveillance drones relayed real-time, full-motion video back to the dozens of stationary and mobile command centers that were lashed up with the military’s many geospatial Google Earth–like data feeds.
Every single one of these military and law enforcement units had multiple backups, even the Colorado-based Northern Command,1 which had been established to defend the United States within its own borders after the 2001 terrorist attacks. And just in case its own headquarters were attacked, Northern Command kept the famous Cheyenne Mountain underground bunker on standby. In Room 3102 in the underground warren, an electronic map of the United States indicated the locations of the military’s most secretive and lethal units, just in case they needed to deploy in a domestic emergency.
By the time the Obama family prepared to move into the White House, it was nearly impossible to find an American unfamiliar with Osama bin Laden. That had been far from the case less than a decade earlier. Indeed, by the time of George W. Bush’s election, the circle of people informed of the activities of Osama bin Laden was getting smaller and smaller, while the threat from his organization was getting larger and larger. This was an odd, counterintuitive phenomenon that had been occurring throughout the national security establishment for at least two years.
The reason was simple: secrecy. Too many government agencies kept too many secrets from one another, and the U.S. government kept too many secrets from the American public.
In fact, the more intelligence that was acquired about bin Laden and his terrorist network, the more closely agencies kept that information to themselves. They often didn’t share it with other agencies, and they almost always put it out of reach of ordinary citizens by classifying it. As a result, the threat of al-Qaeda terrorism was barely on the public radar, and there was little information available that might have convinced most Americans that their government needed to be pressured to work harder to stop the growing menace. The authoritative National Intelligence Estimates, which offer policy makers the best assessments and predictions of the future from various intelligence agencies on a given subject, briefly mentioned Osama bin Laden in 1997. In subsequent years, as the CIA, the FBI, and other agencies were acquiring piles of damning evidence against him, none of it was ever again published in an NIE until after it was too late. As The 9/11 Commission Report summarized so succinctly, referring to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda: “It is hardest to mount a major effort while a problem still seems minor.”
Michael Rolince, an FBI agent who had investigated the Irish Republican Army, Hamas, and Hezbollah terrorist connections in Boston, should have known just about everything there was to know about al-Qaeda by 1998. But he didn’t. “It was an almost entirely classified area in terms of casework,” he recalled. “I’d say ‘terrorism’ [to other agents] and that was the end of the conversation.” When Rolince was transferred to Washington that year, he attended a briefing by John O’Neill, the New York City FBI supervisor who made al-Qaeda his life’s work (and who died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center towers). “He started talking about being in a food fight with another office over a UBL (for Usama bin Laden, the common abbreviation) investigation, and I didn’t have a clue who he was talking about.” The problem, Rolince discovered, was that the bureau didn’t educate its field agents about terrorism unless they were working a case specifically related to it.
Or consider Russel Honoré’s red bag.
Every few days a locked red canvas bag would be hand-carried by a squared-away navy captain to an office next to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon. The captain would open the lock for Lt. Gen. Honoré, watch him carefully pull out the papers inside, wait until he had finished reading and had returned them to the bag, and then quickly lock them up again. Honoré told me he couldn’t take notes on what he read about bin Laden’s whereabouts and any plans to stop him. He couldn’t seek the advice of other senior officers on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS),2 or even mention to them what he had read. Like him, they all had the highest security clearances in the building because, like him, their job was to provide advice to the nation’s top military commander, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, whose job was to provide advice to the president of the United States. As the 9/11 Commission later learned, “at no point before 9/11 was the Department of Defense fully engaged in the mission of countering al-Qaeda, though this was perhaps the most dangerous foreign enemy then threatening the United States.”
Al-Qaeda’s attack on a navy destroyer, the USS Cole, in October 2000, had provided another opportunity to educate the American people on the capabilities and aspirations of bin Laden’s network. But soon after the bombing, the 9/11 Commission discovered later, CIA “analysts stopped distributing written reports about who was responsible.” They “presumed that the government did not want reports circulating around the agencies that might become public, impeding law enforcement actions or backing the President into a corner.”
Inside the White House, the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG), which included the principal national security officials, shrank to an informal subset that called themselves the “Small Group” and aimed to keep sensitive information even more tightly controlled. The consequence, however, was that fewer minds and eyes focused on the difficult question of how to work against a fluid network about which the United States had so little actionable intelligence. The Small Group, which included only those “cleared to know about the most sensitive issues,” according to the 9/11 Commission, reported directly to the president and cabinet members, rather than follow the normal procedure of reporting to more people with greater expertise and more time to deal with the topic.
Typical bureaucratic rivalries also got in the way of organizing a government-wide approach to terrorism in a rational manner, even though such a grave national security threat should have trumped such pettiness. Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism coordinator under President Clinton, told the 9/11 Commission that despite constant pushing from the White House, his position “was limited at the request of the departments and agencies. The coordinator had no budget, only a dozen staff, and no ability to direct actions by the departments or agencies.”
The same dynamic existed at the CIA. In 1998, when director George Tenet had issued his now-famous “We are at war” memo—“I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the Community”—it sounded grand, but little actually happened. As the commission learned, no more resources were added, and apparently few people outside the agency received his declaration—certainly not the American people, because that memo was classified, too.
If so many people with the highest levels of clearance were unaware of the gravity of the threat, regular citizens without security clearances certainly had no idea. It was true that every time an overseas terrorist attack killed enough Americans, the government would disclose a bit more information, as it had after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, after the East African embassy bombings in August 1998, after the failed 1999 Ahmed Ressam millennium plot, and after the USS Cole was attacked.
But it was also true that the contents of the locked red bag delivered to Honoré remained off-limits, even to dozens of senior officers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff who were sworn to secrecy, who could be sent to jail if they broke that promise, and whose jobs were also to come up with ways to keep the country safe.
A Secret Service protective detail had joined Obama on the campaign trail in May 2007, the earliest protection for any candidate in history. It was one of a half-dozen organizations in place that day with its own special operations units, its own snipers, even its own Most Wanted list.
By the morning of the inauguration, FBI and National Security Agency specialists had met with Obama to take a digital print of his voice. His retinas had been scanned, his blood drawn, his DNA officially cataloged. From the lowliest U.S. Capitol Police officer to the most elite “in extremis” commando teams, a special set of watch officers, analysts, special agents, eavesdroppers, collectors, bomb disposal experts, chemical and biological warfare officers, hostage rescuers, bodyguards, communicators, and drivers formed an army dedicated to him alone.
There had been protective shields around Obama’s predecessors, but they had been small compared to this. Since 9/11, presidential protection had gone into hyperdrive, doubling in size like every other hidden agency of the post-9/11 intelligence-military-corporate complex, as had planning for keeping government leaders in touch and in charge during and after a terrorist attack. New arrangements for continuing government operations requiring the participation of every agency, from the Department of Defense to the Indian Health Service, had been developed, as had new secure communications systems and backups. Alternative government sites were renovated and new ones built. After 9/11, Vice President Cheney had spent days in a cold war–era bunker on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border; now other such hideouts around the country were reactivated to operate 24/7.
With so much attention focused on the inauguration of the forty-fourth president, regular crimes in the capital region were viewed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies as suspicious activities with possible links to terrorism. Circulated to every one of these agencies was information that a semiautomatic police rifle and ninety rounds of ammunition had been stolen from a marked Howard County Police car in Maryland, along with a department baseball cap. The same day a second Howard County Police car had been broken into. A full box of ammunition was missing. Local authorities entered these two incidents into the FBI’s massive Guardian database of possible terrorist activity. They also entered and circulated a report from a check cashing business in Woodlawn, Maryland, that had received four thousand dollars wired to an individual in increments from the United Arab Emirates over a period of two months. Analysis from the FBI’s Guardian database of possible terrorist-connected suspicious activities showed that from January to September 2008, there had been an increase in police uniform thefts in the United States. Of the thirty-seven reported incidents, five occurred in the Baltimore area alone. The FBI was investigating each of these, just in case.
Then, just one week before the inauguration, law enforcement received the most specific threat so far. Al-Shabaab was a Somali terrorist organization that had made clear it had the will and capability to strike overseas, and law enforcement officials believed it had adherents within the refugee communities scattered throughout the United States. Now the allegations of a single source set off a frantic race to find a member of the organization who may have slipped into the country from Somalia with a desire to change history.
The fear was not without cause: just a month earlier, a dozen young men from the Somali community in Minneapolis had left home unannounced to return to the Horn of Africa, and a month before that, a nineteen-year-old who had disappeared from the same Minnesota neighborhood had blown himself up in Somalia in a suicide bombing.
The inauguration tip sent dozens of FBI agents dashing across the country and overseas to interview Somalis and other people the bureau hoped had useful information. It met with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police while the CIA checked its databases and worked its sources in Africa. The National Security Agency trained its listening devices on dozens of locations around the world known as al-Shabaab strongholds. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) culled its vast databases for Somali visitors and immigration violators looking for leads. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) doubled up on analysts whose job was to bring all the threads of intelligence together and make sense of it all.
By the eve of the inauguration, investigators had discovered several inconsistencies in the original source’s story, chief among them that the supposed suspect turned out to be in prison in Sudan. But because the FBI, which has the lead on terrorism cases within the United States, didn’t have time to run every lead to ground, no one relaxed—on the contrary: the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis issued a warning that members of al-Shabaab “may attempt to travel to the United States with the intention to conduct an attack during the Presidential Inauguration.” Only two days after the inauguration did they learn that the original tip was actually a “poison pen,” a lead from a source that was meant to falsely discredit someone, usually a rival or an enemy. In this case, the source’s motive was an unresolved family feud.
The other huge, but unspecific, concern was that a lone gunman or bomber, someone who could be impossible to detect because he would have launched his plot alone and might even be American, would try to kill Obama or lots of his supporters. Lacking any hard leads, the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center, a place where the governments of Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia shared and analyzed threat information, had issued a daily summary that warned against just about everything imaginable. The warnings included a log of completely legal demonstrations; authorities believed such activities could provide cover for terrorist or other criminal action. Events to keep an eye on, the center noted, were a protest against Israeli settlements in Gaza, a demonstration in support of immigration reform, another sponsored by Veterans for Peace, an antiwar “Shoe Throwing at the White House,” and an anti-abortion March for Life rally. No one was particularly concerned that these were lawful—keeping track of such groups had become a habit of law enforcement agencies across the country.
Several other reports of out-of-town crimes were also in circulation, including a machine gun heist in rural Pennsylvania and the discovery in Maine of radioactive materials and components for a radiological dispersal device in the house of a suspected member of a white supremacist group.
Nuclear terrorism, even more than biological weapons, was the government’s collective nightmare. Five years earlier, the FBI had been directed to take over the mission of defending against the threat of domestic nuclear attack because military special operations forces, which had previously had the mission, were overburdened with wars overseas. It remained one of the few triggers for a presidential declaration of emergency rule, the so-called martial law that often appears in Hollywood movies. Perren had helped set up the bureau’s domestic Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.3 Obama’s inauguration would be the first in which the FBI would be in full charge of stopping a WMD attack before it occurred. Perren believed the bureau was ready.
But ready for what? That was always the problem. In the months leading up to the January 20, 2009, inauguration, Perren was kept apprised as the new directorate scoured the inventories of Home Depot–type building supply stores for large purchases of fertilizer and other so-called precursor chemicals that could be used to create massive bombs. Proving their ability to gather data from sources most Americans would have thought private and secure, directorate staff had analyzed pharmacy sales, too, looking for patterns of illnesses that might indicate the leading edge of a biological attack, timed to create a full-blown public health disaster on the day of the swearing-in.
Preparations to detect, disarm, or respond to a release of radioactive material were not new. Daily, ever since 9/11, national mission forces—part air force, part army, part Special Operations Forces, part Department of Energy—had maintained units on standby in case of a nuclear emergency. In doing so, they operated under a broader top secret umbrella program code-named Power Geyser in which the Coast Guard and clandestine Navy SEAL units were responsible for interdicting a nuclear device carried by watercraft or, alternatively, evacuating the president by water, if it came to that.
Nimble Elder, another part of the Power Geyser program, trained and equipped the military and FBI forces to search for, locate, and identify nuclear weapons. Most of its subprograms were managed by the White House National Science and Technology Council (NSTC). The Council’s counter-WMD cadre, composed of more than one thousand scientists, included the Attribution Working Group, whose job was to determine which country or terrorist network had detonated the weapon in order to know where to direct an American retaliation. If the nuclear device were found before detonation, it would be disabled and either transported to a navy facility in Maryland for analysis or flown to the Nevada Test Site and disassembled, or intentionally detonated, in G-Tunnel, a 5,000-foot-deep shaft.
Weeks before the inauguration, the president-elect had made sure the people he had chosen for his national security team knew exactly what they were getting into. He asked his team to meet in the presidential transition office, a spacious three floors at 451 Sixth Street, NW, not far from the Capitol, which included a SCIF (pronounced “skiff,” for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) secure room that could not be penetrated by the best eavesdropping equipment. Run by the Central Intelligence Agency, the transition office SCIF included the intelligence community’s top secret communications network, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, or JWICS, as well as secure video capabilities.
On January 5, the room was turned into a command center for a mock national security crisis. Present were the people Obama intended to nominate as his national security team: Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Defense Secretary Robert Gates (who would remain in his role in the new administration), retired Marine Corps general James Jones as national security adviser, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, Eric Holder as attorney general designee, director of national intelligence nominee retired Admiral Dennis Blair, Department of Homeland Security secretary nominee Janet Napolitano, treasury secretary designate Timothy Geithner, and incoming UN ambassador Susan Rice.
As they all sat around a large conference table, Obama’s national security advisers during the campaign, Richard Clarke and Rand Beers, laid out the scenario: Israel was about to bomb Iran. Discuss.
While they debated next steps, Clarke announced some more bad news: al-Qaeda was carrying a nuclear bomb on a freighter headed for Manhattan. Discuss.
The team forgot about Israel and Iran, and called upon a clandestine U.S. rapid-response team to interdict the ship. But the scenario shifted again: the terrorists had slipped off the freighter and onto a boat. Al-Qaeda was now headed to Boston. Discuss.
Before the team could identify which boat carried the deadly device, they were informed it had been offloaded and detonated. Cities along the eastern seaboard were evacuating. Discuss.
They initiated recovery efforts—called “consequence management” in the language of government—but before any resolution could be reached, the harrowing three-hour exercise came to an end. Clarke told them the exercise’s code name was Kobayashi Maru. Only Gates chuckled, alone in understanding the reference to the Star Trek no-good-options training exercise designed to test the character of cadets on the command track at the fictional Starfleet Academy by putting them in a lose-lose scenario. Welcome to the nightmare of an asymmetric world, Clarke was saying, where even small groups of tattered fanatics or deranged individuals could pose existential threats to the country.
At 9:30 a.m. on inauguration day, as Barack and Michelle Obama made last-minute preparations for their trip to the Capitol, President Bush’s national security team met in the White House Situation Room with their incoming counterparts. The subject was what to do about the late-breaking Somali threat. The possibility of canceling the inauguration came up briefly and was quickly batted down. Even though there was great doubt by then about the credibility of the single initial source, because national security officials could not eliminate all possibilities, they had feared they might have missed something big. In the America after the attacks, that was a perpetual fear: that the grains of information would slip through the government’s hands again.
Such dread was a large part of the post-9/11 decade. A culture of fear had created a culture of spending to control it, which, in turn, had led to a belief that the government had to be able to stop every single plot before it took place, regardless of whether it involved one network of twenty terrorists or one single deranged person. This expectation propelled more spending and even more zero-defect expectations. There were tens of thousands of unsolved murders in the United States by 2010, but few newspapers ever blared this across their front pages or even tried to investigate how their police departments had failed to solve them all over the years. But when it came to terrorism, newspaper and other media outlets amplified each mistake, which amplified the threat, which amplified the fear, which prompted more spending, and on and on and on. Europe had broken this cycle with time. There, terrorist acts were treated more like other violent crimes, as part of the modern world that must be confronted, dealt with, but put in a different context. You got to leave your shoes on in the airports of Europe.
As a result of his predecessor’s response to 9/11, the government Barack Obama was about to inherit had really become two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open; the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre—and its entirety, as Pentagon intelligence chief James Clapper admitted, visible only to God.
That off-limits America was the one working to protect the president at that very moment. This was a mission everyone could agree was necessary, especially as the new president and his wife thrilled the crowds, and terrified their protectors, by leaping out of the most secure limousine in the world—a GMC Cadillac with five-inch-thick military-grade armor and its own oxygen and firefighting systems—to walk a few blocks down the massively blocked-off and controlled Pennsylvania Avenue. The moment would be frozen in time by a thousand cameras capturing the confident, handsome couple. But nothing stood still within the military-intelligence-information complex. It raced as quickly and steadily as it had for the last six or seven years.
All the while, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security continued to collect and store the names of thousands upon thousands of Americans who had committed no crime but may have done something that looked suspicious in the eyes of a local cop. The database created by these two agencies would be so secret that there would be no sure way for the individuals to even know they were suspected of something.
The FBI and the military were also building huge biometric databases—with fingerprints and iris scans—of nearly 100 million people, people with top secret clearances, Americans in uniform and their families, government retirees, first responders, contractors. Meanwhile, the National Security Agency, the nation’s surveillance agency, had made great strides giving military leaders and soldiers information they could use to identify and find terrorists and insurgents on the battlefield, but it was still refusing to clarify the extent to which Americans’ emails and cell phone calls were being collected amid the millions of communications the agency vacuumed up each day looking for foreign members of terrorist organizations living in the United States. Everything the NSA did remained so completely classified that it was impossible to guess whether it or its four-hundred-plus top secret contracting companies were following the law, let alone properly spending taxpayer money.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement—the federal government’s second-largest law enforcement agency after 9/11—had started operations against suspected terrorists in the United States, too. To that end, it was getting help from the most elite military Special Operations Forces to target and arrest, if need be, suspected terrorists and illegal immigrants.
And even as the Obamas headed toward the bulletproof parade reviewing stand, overseas the CIA was starting a new day targeting individuals from afar using its armed Predator drones, a practice criticized by some as assassination, which had been banned decades before. Many people in Pakistan, where most of the hits took place, saw it as an undeclared war, and their resentment against the United States only grew bigger with each new strike. The CIA and the most elite Special Operations Forces, known as Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)4 troops, had taken to killing suspected terrorists rather than capturing them because there was no convenient place to put such prisoners in the United States, or anywhere else, for that matter. JSOC had grown to ten times larger than the CIA’s paramilitary unit and could execute missions without any scrutiny from Congress if the president wanted it that way.
Taking office eight years after the 9/11 attacks, President Obama would discover that the two largest bureaucracies created in response to the attacks—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence5 and the Department of Homeland Security6—still had not found their role among the national security agencies. Many people were particularly disappointed in DHS, which they believed was mostly populated by national security amateurs, relying on former federal employees now working as contractors for twice their old salaries. The problem of government intelligence agencies losing experience to private companies was so severe that CIA director Michael Hayden had prohibited any agency employee who left to join the private sector from returning to the agency as a contractor for twelve months. “I did not want us to become a farm system,” he said, but the problem had continued.
Within forty-eight hours of the inauguration, the new president issued his first executive orders: the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, supposedly reserved for the most dangerous terrorists, would close within a year. The CIA’s secret prisons would be shut down and interrogations not in compliance with army regulations and international law stopped. The whole handling of detainees would be thoroughly reviewed.
After eight years of secret decisions, classified memos, and covert operations by the Bush administration, Obama declared a new day. He signed off on instructions to all agencies and departments to “adopt a presumption in favor” of the Freedom of Information Act. He issued a Presidential Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government.
“Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government,” the memorandum read. “Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.”
But the new leader’s idealism quickly faded once he took office. Few of Obama’s transparency initiatives would come to pass. Guantánamo remained open. Some suspected terrorists were sent to prisons run by foreign governments for interrogation rather than trial. Covert operations stayed the centerpiece of the new president’s plan of attack. As the glow of the inauguration faded, Obama embraced the intelligence-military-corporate apparatus, too, and the enduring hidden universe continued to grow larger and more secret every day.