The most hidden part of the world the new president would inherit had a nickname all its own: “Special.” But after 9/11, so many things were labeled “special”—special mission, special activities, special access—that the people who worked on highly classified programs began coming up with alternatives. Sensitive Activities, Extraordinary Activities, Strategic Activities signaled an even more special status. The designations had proliferated so promiscuously that the official in charge of keeping track of them for the director of national intelligence admitted one day that nobody any longer knew what all of them meant.
“You may be talking about one thing, but the person you are talking to is hearing or understanding a completely different category. So it can get very confusing,” he said. “We have explained this to several DNIs now who have all kinda gone, ‘Did you guys do this on purpose?’ ”
The new cornucopia of acronyms and adjectives confused the very people who were supposed to be directly involved with protecting the United States, and threw sleuths like Arkin off the track, too—for a while. He was particularly fond of “special” discoveries because they were such a challenge. It was never a straightforward revelation. For instance, in the fall of 2003, he found a “technical correction” on page 6 of the 62-page House of Representatives’ Emergency Supplemental Appropriations. In the long “operations and maintenance” section devoted to the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which buys everything from toilet paper to uniforms for the military, he noticed $15 million was restored for something called DPAO, which would turn out to be one of those “special” discoveries, but for the time being there was not even an explanation for it, nor even a spelling out of the acronym.
Digging further, in a U.S. House of Representatives budget document he found more details on that $15 million. In fiscal year 2003, the report said, the office of the secretary of defense assigned the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) something called the Defense Policy Analysis Office—DPAO—which was intended to “address the development of DoD support policies, plans, concepts, procedures, and operations as requested by supported organizations.” The mission description seemed too intentionally bland, Arkin thought, and a logistics agency was an odd place for a new policy office to be. The paper trail indicated that the $15 million had initially been deleted because the DPAO’s duties were seen as redundant with the work of other agencies, but then had been mysteriously restored.
Arkin wrote “Defense Policy Analysis Office” at the top of an index card and put it in his Secret Units box, where it remained for nearly a year, until one day a source sent him two CD-ROMs’ worth of unclassified and “For Official Use Only”1 documents for a different project he was working on. There, in the thousands of documents from the newly created Northern Command, was a single page mentioning a civilian liaison officer from DPAO who had been assigned to another bit of alphabet soup—“N/NC-J39.”
It gave Arkin the chills because J39 was one of the oldest entries in his Secret Units file. In the mid-1990s, when he was writing about the emergence of a new kind of warfare—information warfare2—J39 kept popping up. J39 was a staff office assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and run out of a warren of offices in the bowels of the Pentagon. The office managed the most highly classified cyberwarfare programs and weapons intended not to blow things up but to screw things up, things such as electronics or computer controls, using high-powered microwaves and blackout-inducing carbon fibers that could short-circuit enemy electrical power grids.
J39 programs were called Special Technical Operations, or STOs,3 a mysterious range of activities that includes cybersabotage and that, back then, had begun to pop up in every military command in charge of fighting wars in a particular region. N/NC-J39, the acronym after the liaison officer’s name, stood for the NORAD4 and Northern Command’s own J39 office, which connected DPAO and the new domestic military command to some type of highly classified information warfare.
Another year went by before Arkin came up with anything else on DPAO. This time it was from the fiscal year (FY) 2006 defense budget, which said the organization had been transferred to the air force but gave no reason why. A couple of months later, after a routine request, Arkin received a set of documents from the Defense Information Technology Contracting Organization (DITCO), an obscure agency in charge of finding contractors to physically wire one related defense and intelligence office to another, a necessary task given the overlap of secure, encrypted government lines that supplemented the regular phone systems. Buried in its list of the latest available jobs was a request for a secure high-capacity circuit to be installed between J39’s Special Activity Division in the Pentagon and the fifteenth floor of a building in Crystal City, Virginia, leased by DPAO. A second requirement was listed for the same circuit to go between those two buildings and an air force organization only identified as XOIWS in a building in Rosslyn, Virginia.
In the dialect of the air force, “XO” stood for the director of operations of the air force; “I” for the information operations chief one step down; “W” for the Information Warfare branch one more step down; and “S” for the Information Operations (IO) office at the bottom. Influence operations, as the name suggests, are aimed at secretly influencing or manipulating the opinions of foreign audiences, either on an actual battlefield—such as during a feint in a tactical battle—or within the civilian population, such as in undermining support for an existing government or terrorist group. They are also deeply involved with broader efforts to sway international opinion in line with American interests.
Sometimes this involves ploys such as planted newspaper stories and political advertising campaigns for foreign leaders supported by the United States. Other operations have involved intentionally passing disinformation to foreign leaders or spies in highly classified deception operations. In most cases, American involvement is hidden.
Using the address Arkin gave me for DPAO, and armed with a map that the building’s property managers had put online for prospective lessees, I worked my way through the confusing underground shopping complex and tunnels that link buildings leased to the federal government in Crystal City.
Subterranean Crystal City had an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland feel. In its passageways, the wallpaper was printed with giant photographs of tulips and fields of daisies, as if a visitor were Alice after sampling the DRINK ME bottle. Parts of the complex looked like any other mall, with food courts and clothing stores. In other areas, it resembled an indoor city of dry cleaners and shoe repair shops and even doctors’ offices, all to service the thousands of people working in the offices just above. At the food court you might find families dipping fries into ketchup, but down certain corridors connecting different office buildings, nearly everyone was in uniform or wore a government or corporate lanyard with ID and security cards. At these empty dead ends, where the foot traffic was reduced to almost nothing, the only place to get coffee or food was a 1950s-style deli that sold Necco wafers and saltwater taffy. Big gray security locks replaced doorknobs, office numbers replaced office names. One flight up, at street level, trucks with “communications intelligence” painted on their sides idled next to a big black GMC Yukon XL SUV with tinted windows.
The street-level lobby of DPAO’s building contained an automated office directory. Every few seconds the name of the thirty or more organizations in the building scrolled down a monitor mounted on the wall. The names were familiar: names of contractors intimately associated with American intelligence and military agencies: L-1 Identity Solutions, Applied Research Associates, SAIC. A few government offices were named. Although the contracts Arkin had discovered had indicated that the special wiring was to be installed on the fifteenth floor, the last floor listed on the monitor was the fourteenth. According to the lobby directory, DPAO did not exist.
The elevator told another story, though: when I stepped into it, I saw a button for the fifteenth floor, and pressed it.
A cardboard sign reading Defense Policy Analysis Office was tacked up on the door of suite 1501. On the door was a gray electromagnetic lock, the kind whose combination can be changed often to prevent unauthorized entry. Below the lock was a small gray box with a camera inside, shielded by a clear Plexiglas dome. A warning sign said that behind the door was a secure facility. Anyone without the proper clearance should leave.
I wrote down the names of the offices on the other side of the hallway—“Combating Terrorism Technology Support Office” and “Office of the Secretary of Defense, Homeland Security”—and left.
The second office in the DPAO circuit triangle sat just across from the Key Bridge, which connects Washington, DC, to Rosslyn, an austere section of Arlington over the Potomac River. Like Crystal City, Rosslyn houses the government’s overflow and the hundreds of contractors who service the Defense Department and the intelligence community. The air force XOIWS office here overlooked a rundown brick apartment building but was otherwise surrounded by sleek glass office high-rises sporting the logos of the corporate defense-intelligence giants: BAE, Northrop Grumman, and Sparta, all well-known companies but, here in northern Virginia, mere soldiers in the army of government consultants.
Arkin’s documents had indicated that the special circuits were to be installed in Suite 300, to which the lobby directory had no reference. On the surface, it didn’t exist. Over the course of our investigation, we would find this pattern repeated again and again: buildings without addresses, offices without floors, acronyms without explanation.
The building directory had both corporate and government entities. One was named the Policy Support and Special Programs Division, not XOIWS but a suspicious-sounding entity to add to our growing stockpile of secret organizations. The phrase “Special Programs” was a dead giveaway to anyone who even dabbled in intelligence or defense literature. It was a term that had originated at the dawn of the nuclear age when, in order to discuss topics surrounding the highly classified subject of atomic weapons—say, how to transport them—the army had come up with what became a not-so-secret nickname: Special Weapons. The word nuclear was never uttered. When President John F. Kennedy fell in love with the army’s Green Berets, they similarly became army Special Forces, an acknowledgment of their often secret role in warfare. Special this and special that followed, all the way up to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld organizing an Office of Special Plans in the aftermath of 9/11. It was the office that had incorrectly determined that there was a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, and had incorrectly determined that Iraq possessed biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.
Exiting the Rosslyn elevator on the third floor, I was greeted, improbably, by a Welcome sign and a big black arrow pointing down the hall to the XOIWS office. The hardware and camera on the door were nearly identical to the equipment protecting the people inside the Defense Policy Analysis Office in Crystal City. Next to the door was a printed warning often seen outside defense offices. Slipped into a plastic sleeve, it read: “Force Protection Condition Bravo.”5 This was Defense Department dialect for “an increased or more predictable threat of terrorist threat.” In reality, since the initial frenzy of September 11 had died out, the threat level had remained at bravo, much like Homeland Security’s permanent shade of yellow. But this particular Arlington neighborhood, which was around the corner from a church, a gas station, and popular restaurants, was a safe place to work, in a safe part of the country.
I had driven by these areas hundreds of times, never questioning what was going on in the generic buildings that were set back from the street. Now secret doors seemed to be everywhere. I returned to Crystal City with new eyes. This time, I noticed the armed guards for the first time, and more corridors I couldn’t go down without a badge. I found more office directories with missing floors. Indeed, some of the directories for twenty-story buildings were completely blank except for the name of one convenience store in the lobby. There were surveillance cameras everywhere—always rolling, hidden in corners or draped by shadows.
DPAO turned out to be just one single strand of investigation among the hundreds we pursued on the way to mapping the DNA of the secret post-9/11 world. Not all the strands were as small as DPAO seemed to be. Some were housed in massive structures, strategically hidden behind cover names, banks of trees, or tall mountain ridges. Some were underground, like the bunker in Olney, Maryland, to which some congressional leaders had been whisked after the 9/11 attacks. That bunker, since refurbished, was located along a country road. Its guardhouse is barely visible, but by looking carefully at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s contracts for guard and facility maintenance services, Arkin had learned that the facility was quite large—90,000 square feet and under 75 acres, with a newly built helicopter pad, communications towers, and vent stacks.
Olney, though, was far from the largest secret site. One source had told me that there was a lot of CIA activity in one particular rural northern Virginia community. On Google Earth, Arkin and I went through the secret locations in northern Virginia that were listed in his database. Within minutes we’d found what we were searching for: a massive complex on the top of a tree-covered mountain. It looked like it was undergoing construction, just as my source had claimed. I decided to take a look a few days later.
Such expansion had become the unquestioned norm in the post-9/11 world. Each new organization spawned its own microclimate and geography. Each birthed a cadre of specialized contractors. Some companies were founded just to service a particular niche in the counterterrorism world, like those providing remote fingerprint readers or suppliers of regulation fencing for top secret buildings. Each large organization started its own training centers, supply depots, and transportation infrastructure. Each agency and subagency manned its own unit for hiding the identities of undercover employees and for creating cover names and addresses for them and for their most sensitive projects. Each ecosystem developed a set of regional and local offices. And yet there was little that was Darwinian about this jungle, because there was no necessity for positive adaptation: the food supply—in this case, federal dollars—was assured, and the lack of in-depth oversight meant that reproduction was easy and certain.
It had taken me an hour and a half to find the CIA site; I’d started out from my home in Washington. Once at the facility, I cruised around the fenced and barbed wire perimeter at the foot of the mountain. Small, discreet U.S. Property signs warned hunters and horseback riders to stay away. Around one bend in the road, a huge parking lot filled with black Escalade security vans was visible through the trees. Around another bend a sign cautioned drivers: Range in Use.
At the entrance, a quaint historic marker announced the origins of the U.S. Army Training Center. I couldn’t see a thing up the steep road so I turned in and headed up, slowly. A series of unfriendly signs cautioned me to stop: WARNING: Unauthorized persons not permitted; WARNING: Turn around if you do not have official business.
I decelerated to a crawl. At the top I found a spiffy new security center off to the right, and a guard station with reflective mirrored walls to the left. More warning signs made it clear that no one without the proper identification should have come this close and that the guards were well armed, so I stepped slowly from the car. A young man in what were supposed to look like army battle fatigues came out of the guard post. His head was shaved; his eyes, covered with Ray-Ban shades. His military uniform said POLICE above the pocket patch, which immediately announced that he was not in the army at all. Military police don’t wear such outfits, and he was also missing the MP armband or any other military rank or patch identifiers, including the usual last name stitched above the breast pocket.
“Can I ask you a question?” I asked politely.
“Okay,” he responded, nicely enough.
“I just drove past the sign that said Range in Use. Do they use it both in the day and at night? I’m just wondering.”
“It’s very busy,” he replied, shaking his head yes.
“What is this place, anyway?” I asked.
“It’s a training center for the army and other agencies… and for law enforcement agencies, too, and others.”
He was telling the truth, or a small corner of it. I learned later from people who frequented the facility that the mountaintop range was a training center for the CIA’s rapidly expanding contract workforce of security specialists—people like Raymond Davis, who would later be briefly jailed in Pakistan in 2011 after shooting two would-be assailants. The job of these specialists was to hide in foreign countries and discreetly manage security for agency operatives meeting with sources and traveling through risky neighborhoods. The Global Response Staff had become a necessary addition in the expanding secret wars. The CIA’s longtime training site at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Virginia, and its contract firing range at a Blackwater facility in Moyock, North Carolina, were either too crowded or too far away to be convenient for officers and contractors needing to prepare for overseas assignments and brush up on their tradecraft and weapons skills before deploying. (Blackwater was the private security firm that had gotten in so much trouble in Iraq and then changed its name to Xe Services LLC.) This place, on the other hand, was convenient.
Like many installations in this secret world, the CIA facility sat in the middle of a completely normal community. Near the entrance, in fact, was a lovely cottage with an English garden. Such proximity was both intentional and, in many cases, inevitable: the post-9/11 secret world has become so vast that it is impossible to keep it within isolated boundaries. Besides, it was much easier to keep government employees happy and to hire all the private contractors the government needed if people only had to drive to work from their comfortable homes in suburbia.
The gigantic training center was not the only place the expanding CIA had moved into when its ranks began to swell after 9/11. Despite its public reputation, bolstered by spy novels and action films, the CIA is among the smallest of all the intelligence agencies. After the attacks, however, it had increased its office space by one-third. It took over two newly built large office buildings near the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum Center abutting Dulles International Airport, built two other complexes in the nearby Virginia cities of Fairfax and McLean, and moved into another in Herndon, Virginia.
Every one of those buildings had to have a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Indeed, in the post-9/11 world, you couldn’t even get in the sandbox without one of these rooms-within-a-room certified by U.S. security officers as impenetrable by electronic eavesdropping or other sophisticated surveillance technology.
As important to a man’s self-image as the power of his car’s engine or his motorcycle’s rumble, SCIF size had become a symbol of status. “In DC, everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF,” said Bruce Paquin, owner of a construction company that builds SCIFs for the government and private corporations. “They’ve got the penis envy thing going. You can’t be a big boy unless you’re a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF.” Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field. The army manages over five hundred SCIFs in the DC area alone; SCIFs are present even in civil departments like Agriculture and Labor.
Over six months, I visited dozens of addresses with SCIFs in Washington, DC, and its surrounding counties. Often I found myself confirming the information we had in our database, and just as often I added to it. Just as the missing fifteenth floor had been evident as soon as I had entered the elevator, it didn’t always take a huge amount of sleuthing to discover new, concrete information. Each address became another dot on the map. As the dots gathered and clumped, a sort of alternative geography of the greater Washington region began to show itself. This was not quite an invisible geography, but it was a deceptive one. Much of the area looked essentially as it had before 9/11, even with all the new developments and construction. For a significant chunk of the post-9/11 buildup, the part that preceded the housing market collapse and economic downturn, it was not strange to see some sort of construction around every turn. What was different now was that these offices housed thousands of people who worked and lived in a world dedicated to secrecy; who were connected to each other via secure, encrypted telephone and email cables. These constellations, not surprisingly, usually fell within a small radius from particular government agencies. Using his expanding database of top secret government organizations, agencies, companies, and jobs, Arkin gradually determined various links between government efforts and the private companies within each apparent cluster.
One day I drove west along Route 66 with an address Arkin had given me after we had decided to try to find a Defense Intelligence Agency office that analyzed underground bunkers. It turned out to be particularly hard to find. It wasn’t on Google Maps or the other mapping software that we typically examined first to check out whether there was the telltale perimeter fencing of a secure building, or to count the parking spaces to get a sense of how many people worked in a particularly secretive location. As a Michaels craft store and a Books-A-Million gave way to the regional offices of corporate giant Lockheed Martin, I turned left off the exit ramp. There, two shimmering-blue five-story ice cubes stood out among the other concrete block structures. Like most of the drivers streaming by these buildings, I ordinarily would never have given them a second thought. Yet a small sign hidden near some boxwoods indicated that the structures belonged to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA),6 one of the sixteen major intelligence agencies, and one that had changed its name and expanded its mission after 9/11. Its job was to analyze satellite and other intelligence images, to map Earth’s geography, and, most important, to provide an up-to-the-minute visual picture for war planners and military commanders on the ground. Once named the Defense Mapping Agency, it had expanded as the geospatial intelligence service for the entire government, from the intelligence community to the EPA. It was the government’s own Google Earth.
Across the street, in an understated chocolate-brown business complex, I scribbled down all the corporate names I found on little signs on the office doors. One of them was named Carahsoft, a firm we hadn’t yet run across. Subsequent digging revealed it to be a leading intelligence agency contractor specializing in mapping, speech analysis, and data harvesting. A giant in its field, its sign was so small I would have missed it if I had blinked at the wrong time.
Nearby was the government building we were looking for: the Underground Facility Analysis Center. There was no visible sign, and its actual address is nowhere publicly listed. But we knew from talking to officials in the military and by reading job descriptions for potential employees how important the center had become in evaluating weapons that could be used in caves in Afghanistan like the ones Osama bin Laden was believed to be hiding in at one time or another after the United States invaded the country to find him. Center technicians were also helping to develop a new generation of weapons designed to disrupt enemy command center communications when bombing them was not possible.
The NGA was a perfect example of post-9/11 expansion. It had outgrown its half-dozen Washington-area facilities and was busily building a new $1.8 billion headquarters in nearby Springfield, Virginia, south of the Pentagon. When completed, it will be the fourth-largest federal building in the Washington area and home to 8,500 employees. (The construction site is surrounded by view-obstructing trees, and all entrances are blocked and heavily guarded against unauthorized entry.)
The new NGA campus was only one of dozens of new government buildings springing up around Washington—so many that we’d quickly determined that trying to look into all of them was an impossible task. Even just focusing on the largest, Arkin determined that the Washington area had thirty-three large complexes for top secret intelligence work under construction or already finished since 9/11. Together these buildings occupied the equivalent, in square footage, of nearly three Pentagons or twenty-two U.S. Capitols. The cost of construction: unknown. Our counting challenge was shared by the federal government, which, as we would discover, had no idea how many agencies and subagencies were spending taxpayer money.
I first stumbled into what would turn out to be the densest concentration of government offices and private companies doing top secret work in the country after the Defense Department agreed to let me sit in on a class on cipher locks and other ways to protect classified material. The Defense Security Service (DSS) classroom in Elkridge, Maryland, a place you would never ordinarily happen upon, was located near the parking garage behind Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and, unbeknownst to me at the time, an annex of the National Security Agency.
The first indication of its otherworldliness was a lawn sign advertising not the newest tract of homes but a job fair at Joe’s Café for “Cleared” personnel. “Cleared” meant people with security clearances. Joe’s Café turned out to be a rather ordinary coffee and sandwich place, except for the giveaway pens and cardboard hot cup holders imprinted with the names of intelligence contractors. Ordinary except for the posters on the windows that weren’t advertising turkey sandwiches but intelligence analyst and IT jobs at the National Business Park across the way, hidden behind a bank of thick, tall trees.
From the DSS classroom building, I looked out over a four-square-block area of office buildings—all painted the same dark brown, all with the same reflective copper-colored glass windows, and none with anything but a three-digit number on top to distinguish it from the next. No company logos, no names and addresses on the mailboxes. I called Arkin, gave him the addresses, and he looked at his database and came up with a company or organization name to match each one.
As I drove around, I found other clues to the area’s strange nature, like a museum of defense electronics. Instead of a welcome sign, a red warning notice was posted in the lobby: Authorized Personnel Only, it read. For a museum?
The entrance of many of the buildings in the area had small signs out front: COPT, Corporate Office Properties Trust. I phoned Arkin again, with a half-dozen COPT addresses. He dug around the company’s website and I dove into their public financial statements. It turned out to be one of the largest providers of leased government office space for secure buildings, meaning SCIFs, in the nation.
I found a commercial real-estate agent, Dennis Lane, to give me a tour of the region. He took me to more secure office parks the government leased. We drove the perimeters of a dozen other buildings that he or some other real-estate agent he knew had leased to the government for secret business. Some had names out front too dull to mean anything: Foreign Systems Integration Center and DCMA Special Programs East. I passed those addresses to Arkin, who looked them up and then would find other interesting addresses in the same office park, only to discover more government organizations and more corporations doing top secret work nearby. I rigged my computer to the armrest so he and I could Google-Earth these complexes together and discuss the next block to explore. Each drive yielded more clues, more addresses that could be put in the database or into an Internet search engine to produce another obscure company or a government office that we had never heard of before but which often sounded exactly like the half-dozen we had found earlier.
We were not the only ones to notice the vast scale of this concrete expansion of the terrorism-industrial complex. People who worked inside it did, too. Many of the newest buildings appeared, from the outside at least, to house utilitarian, unattractive offices. Maj. Gen. John M. Custer III, head of the army’s intelligence school, who had spent most of his time after 9/11 in war zones but had been inside more than his share of new intelligence buildings, described these edifices to me as being “on the order of the pyramids.”
This was not the half of it.
In 2010, five miles southeast of the White House, the young Department of Homeland Security broke ground for its new headquarters. The largest of the post-9/11 cabinet-level departments, DHS already had a massive 230,000-person workforce, the third largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. Now a $3.4 billion testament to its efforts was rising from the crumbling brick wards of the former St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in the Anacostia section of southeast Washington. It will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon and a major landmark in the permanent alternative geography of Top Secret America.
The alternative geography projects also crisscross the country, to Denver-Aurora, Colorado, where the largest federal neighborhood outside Washington is still growing; to Tampa–St. Petersburg, Florida, where the military’s Central Command and Special Operations Command overflow into the rundown business parks of St. Petersburg; to San Antonio, headquarters of military information warfare and air force intelligence; and Arnold, Missouri, where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s mapping facility shares the street with Target and Home Depot. A $1.7 billion NSA data storage warehouse is planned near Salt Lake City. In Tampa, the Central Command’s new 270,000-square-foot intelligence center will be matched by an equally large new headquarters building, and then, after that, by a 51,000-square-foot building just for its Special Operations section. In Miami, the Southern Command responsible for Latin America and the counternarcoterrorism war there constructed a 600,000-square-foot headquarters building for $400 million. Just north of Charlottesville, Virginia, a new intelligence analysis center, the Joint Use Intelligence Analysis Facility, will consolidate 1,000 defense intelligence analysts on a secure rural campus to manage the overflow of army intelligence and the Washington-based Defense Intelligence Agency.
As impressive as all that may be, it pales beside the clandestine metropolis rising around the nation’s capital. Ask anyone who knows Washington, DC, and they will say the federal city is defined by the White House, the Capitol, the Mall, and the Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington monuments. Passengers on flights into and out of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport can pick out the other points of political and cultural power: the five-sided Pentagon, the majestic National Cathedral, the towering office buildings and shopping malls of Tysons Corner near where the revolution in information technology was launched in the 1980s, beginning the permanent transformation of the region.
The alternative geography, on the other hand, would be defined by the CIA’s aging white Langley headquarters and its new annexes near Dulles Airport, the National Reconnaissance Office’s7 aqua blue steel buildings in Chantilly, Virginia, and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s gigantic, sailboat-shaped headquarters on Bolling Air Force Base just across the Potomac River from National Airport.
But the capital of this alternative United States of America is found some twenty-four miles to the north, close to Interstate 95, and closer to Baltimore than Washington, in the neighborhood where I first visited the cipher lock training class. The many business parks there were larger and mostly unadorned. The extended-stay hotels for contractors and traveling government employees were paler than others elsewhere. Even the Starbucks Coffee shop looked off. It was located in a stark white office building, and at 11:00 a.m., when many Starbucks are brimming with break-time conversations, this one was empty. Finally, at lunchtime, a stream of customers with corporate lanyards and security badges came in, half of them in uniform. We called it The Loneliest Starbucks in America.
Little else around this community was what it appeared to be, either. The brick warehouse was not just a warehouse—drive through the gate and around back, and there, hidden away, was the government’s future personal security detail: a fleet of black SUVs that had been armored up to withstand explosions and gunfire. On closer glance, the new gunmetal-colored office building was a kind of hotel where businesses could rent eavesdrop-proof rooms for meetings and training sessions. Even the manhole cover in between the two low-slung buildings was not just a manhole cover. Surrounded by cement cylinders, it was an access point to reach a secret government cable. “TS/SCI,” one of my escorts whispered one afternoon as I was visiting the building next door—the abbreviations for Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, and what that means is that only those with the highest clearances are allowed to know what information the cable transmits. And no surprise, because this was near the National Security Agency, which is also the nation’s premier offensive cyberforce.
The Baltimore-area Top Secret America cluster turns out to be the largest of a dozen such clusters across the United States. This fact is unknown to most people, and that is the way the government wants it. When the GPS on a car’s dashboard suddenly gets stuck in a frustrating loop, trapping the driver in a series of U-turns near the National Security Agency, it’s because the NSA takes countermeasures against infiltration that don’t distinguish between spy equipment and personal travel aids.
Not surprisingly, from almost any direction near its headquarters, the NSA is difficult to see. Trees, walls, and sloping landscape obscure its presence from the highway, and concrete barriers, fortified guard posts, and warning signs stop drivers without authorization from entering the grounds of the largest intelligence agency in the United States. Its budget, much of it for technology, has doubled since 9/11, the exact amount classified but estimated at over $25 billion annually.
Beyond all those concrete barriers loom huge buildings with row after row of opaque, blast-resistant, and eavesdrop-proof windows, behind which an estimated thirty thousand people are reading, listening to, and analyzing an endless flood of intercepted conversations and communications twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
From the road, it’s impossible to tell how large the NSA has become; military construction documents submitted to Howard County, however, reveal that its buildings occupy 6.3 million square feet—the size of the Pentagon—and are surrounded by 112 acres of parking spaces. As massive as that might seem, the documents indicate the NSA is only going to get bigger: ten thousand workers will be added over the next fifteen years. It will cost $2 billion to pay for just the first phase of expansion. An overall increase in size will boost its building space to nearly ten million square feet.
The NSA sits within the larger Fort Meade army base, which hosts eighty government tenants in all, including several large intelligence organizations. Just beyond the perimeter is where the companies that thrive off the NSA and other intelligence organizations begin and fan out ten miles from the NSA headquarters, covering some 254 square miles. Together they inject $10 billion from paychecks, contracts, and service businesses like hotels and restaurant into the region’s economy every year. In some parts of this cluster, they occupy entire neighborhoods. In others, they make up mile-long business parks connected to the government agency’s large campus through hidden bridges studded with forbidding yellow warning signs.
The largest is the National Business Park—285 tucked-away acres of wide, angular glass towers that go on for blocks. The occupants of these buildings are contractors who in their other, more publicly noticeable locations purposely understate their presence. But in the National Business Park, a place where only other intelligence contractors would have reason to go, their office signs are a full story tall and at night glow in bright red, yellow, and blue: L-3 Communications, CSC, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, SAIC.
Even at 9:00 p.m. in the confines of the National Business Park, office lights remain on here and there. The 140 rooms of the Marriott Courtyard are completely occupied, as usual, with guests, such as the one checking in who says only that he’s “with the military.”
More than 250 companies—fully 13 percent of all the firms working for the government on programs at the top secret classification level—have a presence in the Fort Meade cluster. Some have multiple offices, such as Northrop Grumman (nineteen) and SAIC (eleven). In all, there are 681 locations in the Fort Meade cluster at which businesses conduct work at the top secret level for the National Security Agency and the rest of the intelligence community.
Some of those locations are in parklike settings with eco-friendly buildings of shimmering glass and award-winning modern art sculptures, all hidden behind banks of lush trees. Others are in areas that are mostly asphalt, cement, parking lots, extended-stay hotels and large, pillbox offices in every shade of brown and displaying only an address number. In another part of the cluster, yellow buses that carry children to school park outside highly secured buildings where intelligence is shared with Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and the grade of the fencing is inspected by the NSA security staff.
In still another neighborhood, the juxtaposition of old and new was jarring; a gigantic warehouse with sensitive equipment inside sat next to two modest homes, one with a vegetable garden out back. “It used to be all farmland, then they just started digging one day,” said Jerome Jones as he tended his garden, a cement wall looming beyond the tomato plants. “I don’t know what they do up there but it doesn’t bother me. I don’t worry about it.”
The building is sealed off behind fencing and Jersey barriers and is larger than a football field. It has no identifying sign. It does have an address, except that Google doesn’t recognize it. Type it in and what Google displays is another address, every time.
“6700,” the sign says outside the gate.
No street name. Just 6700.
Soon, there will be one more feature in the Fort Meade cluster mix: a new four-story building near a quiet gated community of upscale town houses that the builder boasts can withstand a car bomb.
Commercial real-estate agent Lane, the building’s owner, had his engineers reinforce the steel beams to meet government specifications for security. The senior vice president of a local real estate firm has become something of a snoop himself when it comes to his NSA neighborhood. At fifty-five, he has lived and worked in its shadow all his life and has schooled himself on its growing presence in his community. He collects business intelligence. He has his own network of informants, executives like himself hoping to make a killing off an organization many of his neighbors don’t know a thing about. Lane takes note when the NSA or another secretive government organization leases another building, hires more contractors, and expands its outreach to the local business community. He’s been following construction projects, job migrations, corporate moves. He knows local planners are estimating that another 10,000 jobs will come with an expanded NSA and another 52,000 from other intelligence and information technology organizations moving to the Fort Meade post.
Lane was up on all the gossip months before it was announced that the next giant new military command, Cyber Command,8 would be run by the same four-star general who heads the National Security Agency. “This whole cyber thing is going to be big,” Lane says, a twinkle of excitement in his eyes. “A cybercommand could eat up all the building inventory out there.”
Lane knows this because he has witnessed the post-9/11 growth of the NSA, which now ingests 1.7 billion pieces of intercepted communications every twenty-four hours: telephone calls, radio signals, cell phone conversations, emails, text and Twitter messages, bulletin board postings, instant messages, website changes, computer network pings, and IP addresses. And that was what lurked behind some of those doors, those along the secure corridors in Crystal City, those in dull-looking office buildings in dull-looking business parks in cities around the country: computers delivering images and reports from the U.S. government’s own internal search engines, banks of television monitors showing a satellite-fed stream of briefings, intelligence reports, news, and video-teleconferences on a closed-circuit television network that connected commanders, intelligence officers, and analysts on six continents. And beyond that the information technology (IT) companies that developed and staffed the government’s computer systems, and beyond that the intelligence and military offices that were supposed to help protect all of this. And beyond that still, the separate multi-billion-dollar computer networks for each agency and its many subagencies; the 24-hour command centers; the 365-day-a-year watch floors and fusion centers—31 of them in the Washington area alone—where intelligence from many different agencies was linked together and analyzed. And this is why the NSA is never empty. Its mathematicians, linguists, techies, and cryptologists—the cryppies—flow in and out around the clock. The ones leaving descend the elevators to the first floor. Each is carrying a plastic, bar-coded box. Inside is a door key that rattles against the side of the box as he walks. To those who work here, it’s the sound of a shift change.
As employees just starting their shifts push the turnstiles forward, those who are leaving push their identity badges into the mouth of the key machine. A door opens. They drop their key box in, then push out through the turnstiles. They go to the parking lot, and drive slowly through the barriers and gates protecting the NSA, passing a steady stream of cars headed in. It’s almost midnight in the Fort Meade cluster, a sleepless place, the capital of Top Secret America, growing larger, even ten years after September 2011.
Our map of this hidden world had its dots and lines, but that had only really told us what was on the surface. Half of the alternative geography of the United States is anchored in an arch that includes the National Security Agency, stretching from Leesburg, Virginia, forty-five miles west of the Capitol, to Quantico, forty miles to the south, then back north through Washington and curving northeast to Linthicum, just north of the Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. But, as spies and their governments throughout history have learned the hard way, information means little unless connections can be made. To understand Top Secret America, we would have to go deeper.