Every police agency sending a terrorist tip in to the FBI and every FBI bureau that began working on counterterrorism since the 9/11 attacks created a ripple throughout the national security bureaucracy. More tips and more counterterrorism organizations meant more intelligence analysts, more investigators, more technical spying experts, gadget inventors, and out-on-the-street agents. Those people, in turn, required more administrative and logistics support: secretaries, clerks, recruiters, librarians, personnel managers, IT staff, construction workers, architects, janitors, air-conditioning mechanics, security specialists, countless guards; and every one of them, including those who emptied the trash and processed health insurance claims, had to have a top secret clearance.
Even organizations that did not directly perform top secret work needed a few employees with security clearances. On Capitol Hill, the Senate sergeant at arms, the Architect of the Capitol, the U.S. Capitol Police, all these law enforcement officers of Congress whose jobs are also to protect the members, they, too, have top secret clearances so they can be briefed by the Secret Service on classified threats, and can be read into sensitive evacuation plans. The National Archives staff need clearances, too—and their own special SCIF in Maryland—in order to have access to historic classified documents.
In fact, there isn’t a single federal department that doesn’t have a group of employees with top secret clearances to receive sensitive threat-reporting information, to join interagency committees, and to plan for national security emergencies and participate in classified exercises using terrorist attack scenarios. This includes the National Park Service, whose newly created intelligence and counterterrorism unit protects Washington monuments and other national icons. The same is true for the Environmental Protection Agency, where law enforcement coordinators deal with sensitive information about chemical and biological agents, and for the Department of Labor, which handles health-care claims for some clandestine military employees.
The expansion of top secret clearances has been so extensive and opaque that not even the people charged with answering the public’s questions always know what is happening in their own agencies. When Arkin called the U.S. Forest Service’s public affairs office to ask how many employees had top secret clearances, the conversation sounded like an argument between first graders.
“We don’t have anyone with a top secret clearance,” the staffer told him.
“Yes, you do,” Arkin said.
“No, we don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, we don’t.”
“I’ll email the information to you.”
That was the way the conversation went at a half-dozen agencies.
Then again, for employees of other agencies, it was hard to track the influx. Even in offices long used to dealing with a cadre of top secret employees, the speed of the expansion after 9/11 made the clearance process impossible to keep up with. When Arkin compiled a chart listing the number of people with top secret clearances throughout the government—a calculation based on two years of reporting and reviewing budgets—the person in charge of clearances for most government employees (most, but not all, because no one was in charge of them all) said: “That sounds about right.” Then she asked if she could use a copy of his chart for her next congressional testimony.
The huge numbers aren’t unprecedented. At the height of the cold war, more Americans had held top secret clearances than at any point in history. But back then government was twice as large overall, and the military five times the size it is today. Most people granted top secret clearance were building bombers and missiles and managing a stockpile of thirty thousand nuclear weapons. The number shrank precipitously from the mid-1980s through the end of the century.
This new top secret boom was a different animal. Arkin estimated that if you added in the legions of private contractors hired after 9/11 to do work once handled by federal employees, and if you counted all the political appointees, military personnel, state and local officials, and law enforcement officers, 854,000 people held top secret clearances. This number roughly equaled one and a half times the entire population of the nation’s capital.
Requests for new clearances after the terrorist attacks so overtaxed the Defense Security Service (DSS), the agency that grants clearances to industry contractors, that on April 28, 2006, DSS shut down the process altogether, sending shock waves through the nation’s most dynamic business sector. DSS “will reject any requests that are submitted,” read an urgent notice sent to businesses via email that day. The backlog of pending cases had grown to 700,000. DSS had simply run out of money to process any more.
A top secret clearance is a passport to prosperity for life. Salaries for employees with top secret clearances are significantly higher than those for someone doing the same thing at an unclassified level. A clearance is also almost a guarantee of permanent employment, even in economic hard times. Top secret clearances are coveted for those reasons, and also because they are a sign of acceptance into an elite corps of individuals entrusted with knowing what other citizens cannot know, and with securing the country’s future. But as the tens of thousands of Americans newly ushered into the world of Top Secret America soon discovered, getting a clearance is like walking through a mirror into an alternate universe. To obtain a top secret clearance, employees must submit to intrusive background investigations. They must take lie detector tests routinely, sign nondisclosure forms, and file lengthy reports whenever they travel overseas. Not only are they extensively interviewed, but their friends and neighbors are questioned as well. Once hired, they are coached on how to deal with nosy neighbors and curious friends. They learn how not to talk about work, even within their families. Some are trained to assume false identities for one assignment, or for a few years, or an entire lifetime, giving up contact with friends, and in some cases even family, to go undercover.
These strictures spawn a tendency for the cleared not only to marry the cleared but to live around others with comparable restraints, gathered in neighborhoods populated by people like themselves in a version of a traditional military town. They are economically dependent on the federal government and culturally defined by their unique work. The difference, though, is that while the military may be an insular society, it is not a secret culture. On the contrary, soldiers and officers wear their names and ranks prominently on their uniforms. They display badges and patches that tell a personal narrative of skills acquired, places deployed to, awards received, and wars fought. They belong to huge alumni associations and openly support charitable works. They offer to put themselves in harm’s way and in return receive modest salaries but high public praise. The public debate about the military’s role in protecting the country and promoting American values is open and vibrant. Their mission is honored in parades; their sacrifices are glorified in public tributes, their triumphs and defeats studied by students and historians. Even their cemeteries are national places of honor.
None of this is true for the civilians of Top Secret America. A glimpse of a lanyard attached to a digital entry card is often the only clue to their status. Many are forbidden from providing a job title in public. Most are prohibited from telling outsiders what they are working on. Achievements are celebrated in closed, invitation-only ceremonies. Likewise, public debate about the role of intelligence and counterterrorism agents and analysts in protecting the country usually only takes place when something goes wrong and Congress or the Justice Department investigates, or when an unauthorized disclosure of classified information finds its way into the media.
Not being able to defend, or even discuss, your life’s work, even with intimate friends or colleagues in your own agency, can often end up meaning you have no intimate friends, said Jeanie Burns, who knows that all too well.
Burns, a businesswoman who works in Laurel, Maryland, near the National Security Agency’s cluster of government offices and private companies, has been living with a civilian with clearance for more than twenty years. He’s been to war. She doesn’t know where. He does something important. She doesn’t know what.
She fell for him two decades ago and has had a life of adjustments ever since. When they go out with other people, she calls ahead with cautions: “Don’t ask him stuff,” she will say. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t, and when they don’t, “it’s a pain. We just don’t go out with them again.”
I met Burns at a local bar that a source had described as a popular hangout for NSA employees. As we talked, she pointed out the people in the bar who were from the agency. They were the ones, she said, whose style of dress and whose haircuts looked ever so slightly out of fashion. At one point as she sat on the bar stool scanning the room, she began to whisper. “Undercover agents come in here, too,” to watch the people from the NSA, she said, “to make sure no one is saying too much.” Counterintelligence agents listening to employees after work hours was just one example of the government’s reach into the lives of people with security clearances.
In a world where so much is left unsaid, it’s surprising how much can be inferred. Cultural clues about this world abound around the nation’s capital, where more than half of the citizens of Top Secret America reside. In my years of covering intelligence agencies, I abandoned most of my preconceived notions about the people who work in intelligence, but I developed certain stereotypes. FBI agents sport very short pompadour haircuts and favor Italian food and Irish drink. When not in uniform, members of the military special forces wear cargo pants, healthy mustaches, and some version of Oakley sunglasses. They can often be spotted moving in small packs throughout the city and eating at inexpensive sandwich joints before noon, having started their workday with physical training at five in the morning.
CIA employees are less easily stereotyped; some are slovenly and fat; some are so highly polished that their fingernails and teeth glisten. A few might be taken for James Bond with their savoir faire and good looks, but most stand out in no way whatsoever, which may be a job skill. Most are easy talkers, if you can get them started. They favor red meat and boiled potato restaurants near CIA headquarters, as well as Greek and Lebanese restaurants not far away. Many retire in the same northeastern coastal or western mountain communities.
The NSA, with its historic work breaking the codes of foreign messages, employs the largest number of mathematicians in the world and is considered to have the most technically proficient people of any government agency. The NSA needs programmers, scientists, linguists, IT experts, and cryptologists. Many at the NSA brand themselves ISTJs, which stands for “introverted with sensing, thinking, and judging,” a basket of personality traits identified on the Myers-Briggs personality test and summarized on one website this way: “ISTJ types are instinctively drawn toward tradition…. They have an inherent sense of duty that is virtually unshakable, making them relentlessly dependable. When they’re working toward a goal that is consistent with their beliefs and obligations, ISTJs are tireless.”
But it’s no accident that the I for introvert comes first. “How can you tell the extrovert at NSA?” goes the joke. “He’s the one looking at someone else’s shoes.”
All agencies within the walls of Top Secret America have common customs. A badge connotes status and rank. The pecking order is well known: blue for civilian federal employees; brown for military, which often means only a years-long rotation in any given place; green for contractors, the bottom of the pyramid. At the White House, the coveted color is tan: cleared for unlimited access.
Then there is a pecking order within the pecking order, indicated by the small letters typed on every badge showing the office an employee works in. The office is usually the source of true power: OSD for the Office of the Secretary of Defense,1 for instance. Status awareness comes naturally to those with Type A personalities and ambitions. The fast glance-down-at-the-badge-when-the-badge-wearer-is-not-looking is an automatic reflex in the top secret workplace.
Put tens of thousands of straitlaced overachievers together, funnel them billions of dollars in contracts and salaries, build state-of-the-art office parks for them to work in, and it should be no surprise that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, six of the ten wealthiest, best-educated counties in the United States are found within the geographic heart of Top Secret America. All that commitment, all that study, all that money, also means that despite the economic downturn, the cities and counties of Top Secret America share the lowest unemployment rates and the highest real estate values in the nation.
Loudoun County, Virginia, ranked the wealthiest county in the country, helps supply the workforce to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which manages spy satellites. Fairfax County, the second wealthiest, is home to both the NRO and the CIA. Arlington, ranked ninth, hosts the Pentagon and major intelligence agencies. In Maryland, Montgomery County, ranked tenth, is home to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the nuclear weapons program of the Department of Energy. And Howard County, ranked third, is home to eight thousand NSA employees. “These are some of the most brilliant people in the world,” said Ken Ulman, the county executive for Howard County. “They demand good schools and a high quality of life.”
The schools are among the best in the nation, and some of them have adopted a curriculum that teaches children as young as ten what kind of lifestyle is required to get a security clearance and what kind of behavior will disqualify them from one. To educate the next generation, Washington-area universities offer majors in the specialties required by the intelligence agencies, too—cybersecurity, emergency management, advanced IT, geographic information systems.
If there were a style to mark all this success, it would not be the glitter and bling of a Beverly Hills or the European sleekness of the Upper East Side of New York City. It would be an understated Middle Americanism of a company town where the company can’t be mentioned. “If this were a Chrysler plant, we’d be talking Chrysler in the bowling alley, Chrysler in the council meetings, Chrysler, Chrysler, Chrysler,” said Kent Menser, a Defense Department employee helping Howard County adjust to NSA’s local growth. But in Top Secret America’s suburban heart, silence and avoidance are everyday practices.
On a sunny day in Elkridge, Maryland, as housewives and their young children filled the shopping malls, a white van pulled out of a driveway and headed toward the center of the sprawling suburb. It looked like another shopper on an errand, except for the fact that five other unmarked vans followed it. Inside each one, two agents from the secretive Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA)2 were trying not to get lost as they careened around local roads practicing “discreet surveillance.” They were learning how to follow a suspected spy, in this case someone playing the role of an army officer who was giving away secrets to a foreign contact for money.
The job of counterintelligence agents like these from the army, air force, U.S. Customs, and other government offices is to identify foreign spies targeting their organizations and to detect American traitors. Their numbers have greatly increased with the growth of foreign espionage, especially from China. They are also looking for terrorists hiding inside Top Secret America, although none have been found, except a few within the ranks of the military.
JCITA is one of the largest training academies, with some four thousand federal and military agents attending classes at the school every year, intermingling incognito in the seemingly bland suburb, as these agents were, cruising past unsuspecting civilians. On this day, I tagged along.
The agent riding shotgun, a sleek female, carried maps divided by numbered grids she used to follow the other cars’ locations. As we drove, she frantically moved yellow stickies around on the map as the radio crackled with the voices of other drivers calling out a street intersection or other landmark. The goal was to have all five vans keep track of the suspect, whom they referred to as the “rabbit,” by boxing him in wherever he went. This was harder than it sounded.
Some agents gunned their engines and raced along at 60 mph, trying to keep up with the rabbit while alerting the others to the presence of local police, who didn’t know that the vans weaving in and out of traffic were being driven by federal agents.
At one point, the rabbit suddenly moved a full block ahead of the closest van. He passed through a yellow light and then drove out of sight as the agents got stuck at a red light. An interminable moment passed before the light turned green.
“Go!” the female agent yelled through the windshield at the car in front of her, lingering unacceptably as the light changed. “Move! Move! Move!”
“We lost him,” her partner groaned as they did their best to catch up.
After several miles of barely controlled chaos, the agents spotted the rabbit again, at a Borders bookstore in Columbia. Six men in polo shirts and various shades of khaki pants entered the store, scanning the magazine racks and slowly walking the aisles. Their instructor cringed. “The hardest part is the demeanor,” he confided, watching as the agents attempted to follow the rabbit in a store filled with women and children in shifts and flip-flops. “Some of them just can’t relax enough to get the demeanor right…. They should be acting like they’re browsing, but they are looking over the top of a book and never move.”
Before agents can even begin to learn the proper demeanor for surveillance, they have to pass the elaborate top secret security clearance process, which is supposed to take three to six months but can sometimes take more than a year. Polygraphs require polygraphers, many of whom learn their craft at the National Center for Credibility Assessment, which is also part of the Defense Intelligence Agency and located at Fort Jackson in South Carolina—credibility assessment being a fancy way of figuring out whether someone is lying.
The idea of lying or, more broadly, of deception subtly permeates the otherwise congenial atmosphere of the center. Up the lobby stairs, in front of the director’s office door, a beach ball–sized plastic dome protrudes from the ceiling. Inside the dome a surveillance camera, the largest one I’d ever seen, watches—though for what, I wasn’t certain. Maybe the camera was merely a way to instill paranoia in a group of people who are paid to be paranoid, to think everyone is lying.
The center’s research arm, also located at Fort Jackson, experiments with ever less intrusive and more accurate ways to ferret out lies: Is a job applicant claiming not to drink heavily actually an alcoholic? Is a supposedly loyal agent passing secrets to the Chinese? Is an Iraqi going through a checkpoint in Baghdad really a neighborhood resident, as he claims? Is the terrorist suspect under interrogation telling the truth?
But as the director, William Norris, said, “This isn’t like on TV. It’s not like in the movies.”
The setting—a typical military schoolhouse, with its institutional brown paint and flimsy furniture—sure didn’t feel like the back lot at 20th Century Fox. And the work routines all seemed fairly boring, completely devoid of the tension laced through the typical spy movie script—at least until the moment when the orientation briefing was about to begin and there was nothing on the conference table except my notebook and a set of cork coasters and someone asked me: “Are you recording this?”
For a second I felt like a loser because I wouldn’t have even known how to secretly record anyone. With a button-recorder concealed on my lapel? With a boxy old-fashioned cassette player in my purse? Then, remembering the large, paranoia-inspiring camera hanging over the director’s office, I leaned forward and spoke directly into the cork coasters: “No. Are you recording this?”
Everyone laughed: the director, the assistant director, and my two escorts, who had flown all the way from Washington—one from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the other from the spooky Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center, where the military’s few truly undercover spies work.
Norris punched a big button on the remote control to start the PowerPoint command briefing.
There were 500 polygraphers before 9/11. Now there are 670 at 24 agencies. Three times a year, potential examiners come for a fourteen-week course in forensic psychophysiology, meaning the study of what the body does in response when a person attempts to deceive. Students use volunteers—soldiers stationed at Fort Jackson—as guinea pigs.
To better understand the polygraph experience, I asked to be a guinea pig. I was escorted into a small room with no windows and took a seat in a hard plastic chair. It had a pad on it that would record changes in my pulse. Two telephone cord–like tubes were strapped around my chest and stomach to measure my breathing. Gel tabs were slipped over a finger on each of my hands, and cardio cuffs were lashed around a bicep to record my blood pressure and heart rate.
The examiner, a former Secret Service agent, instructed me to lie in response to the third question so he could get a baseline reading. Even when nothing is at stake, as in this demonstration, the body gives off signals indicating deception. These translate into the movement of the needle across a scrolling paper—this bit, despite Norris’s pronouncement, just like in the movies. The movements are read and recorded by another examiner sitting in the room next door.
The agreed-upon false answer pushed the needle so far up it actually left the scroll of paper altogether. The examiner said this meant I was a poor liar. That was not news: when the DIA public affairs officer asked why I wanted to visit the academy, I had to admit I wasn’t sure. It was one place in Top Secret America I hoped to actually get into and describe from the inside, even though I also knew no one would be showing me anything classified top secret. My Defense Intelligence Agency escort, an earnest man who had always tried hard to answer my questions over my years of military reporting, took the chair and was questioned by the polygrapher. The procedure was the same. When it came time for my escort to utter his prearranged lie, the needle barely moved. Curious.
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the accuracy of lie detector tests, but the Defense Department and other intelligence agencies still rely on them to grant and renew security clearances. What’s generally agreed upon is that they don’t work very well in foreign cultures, where the whole setup becomes too intimidating and ill-trained translators can throw off an accurate answer.
With this in mind, the academy researches new technologies in a deception laboratory on the campus. This is where the army and the intelligence agencies are hoping to strike a blow against suicide bombers, and old-fashioned loose-lips within their own agencies. Among the newest technologies was a machine that measures the movement of a subject’s eyeballs. When the eye pattern deviates from the norm—say, when the face of a suspected terrorist, or an associate of the suspect’s, is flashed on a screen—the machine indicates possible deceptive thoughts (because perhaps the subject recognized the face but is trying to hide it).
There was a voice stress analysis machine and what looked like a dental chair hooked up to a giant video game screen. The subject—say, an Afghan worker coming to a job at the American base in Bagram—would sit in the chair, look into the screen, and answer a series of questions. The machine would read his pupils, record his sweat response, and produce an initial credibility assessment. Another technology under study was a camera that can read the heat emitted from someone walking past, outlining places on the body’s image that are devoid of heat, as would be the case if the person were carrying a concealed gun or wearing a suicide vest.
The research lab was also experimenting with an interrogation booth. Post photographer Nikki Kahn couldn’t resist climbing inside. Nikki found a chair facing a television screen. The booth was pitch-black inside until an avatar appeared on the screen and asked her a series of questions. Kahn’s face, which appeared on a screen outside the booth, was recorded by a radiometric thermal imaging camera. It translated her facial image into a rainbow of colors, each representing a biological quality such as perspiration or blood flow, changes in the colors possibly indicating deceit. Nervousness, for instance, increases the size of blood pooling near the surface of the face, especially between the eyes and on either side of the nose bridge. The camera can also see perspiration and count the pores, which open up under the stress of lying.
Researchers at the academy were also studying how changing an avatar’s race, culture, gender, and physical features (hair length, eye shape, mouth size) could elicit more truthful answers from a subject of a certain race, culture, and gender. They are pairing these qualities with certain computer-generated facial expressions and voice intonations.
If the avatar is programmed to wrinkle its nose or raise its upper cheek, does that signal skepticism for persons of every ethnic background? If it raises its voice, do both the Iraqi male and the Japanese female react in the same way? Already researchers seem to agree that creating an older-looking female Hispanic avatar elicited the most honest answers from young Hispanic men.
One day, these researchers hope, a tiny screen will be attached to a soldier’s helmet, allowing a perfectly designed avatar—beamed down to the screen via satellite—to ask a village elder, for instance, a question. His verbal and physiological response will be beamed back to a technician sitting in an office like this in South Carolina.
My favorite technology was the laser Doppler vibrometer, a noncontact polygraph that works by measuring reactions on the subnanometer range, which is much smaller than the diameter of a strand of hair. The operator points a tiny red laser beam at a branch of the subject’s carotid artery. The beam can hear the rhythms of the entire body: the heart valves opening and closing, the lungs breathing in and out, muscle tremors and blood flow. It detects the slightest change in reaction to a question asked at a distance by a person using a megaphone: “Do you have a bomb strapped to your chest?” The subject can’t feel a thing and doesn’t even know he has been hit by the harmless laser beam.
The vibrometer is also of great use on the battlefield. In combat, a medic crouching behind a tank ninety feet away from a downed soldier can point the laser at the bottom of his boot and determine—through the vibrations that are picked up by the beam—whether the soldier is dead or alive.
Lying is only one of the reasons new applicants for security clearances and those wishing to renew their clearances are often denied them. Financial circumstances—debt and overspending—account for 50 percent of the reason clearances are denied by intelligence agencies and the Defense Department. Another 25 percent of the applicants denied clearances were found not to have answered the questions on the form truthfully. The remaining 25 percent are declined due to unacceptable alcohol consumption, gambling, chronic drug use, sexual misbehavior such as hiring prostitutes or viewing child pornography, or messy divorces, or because the applicant is married to, or socializes with, a citizen of a potentially hostile nation.
These claims are adjudicated in secret courtrooms around the country. Administrative judges from the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals (DOHA)3 hear the cases. Type “security clearance” and “lawyer” into a Google search engine and up pop the names of attorneys who make their living representing applicants who were denied clearances or denied a renewal of the one they once held, and who are trying to appeal. The actual cases and verdicts are online, too. Although the names are redacted, reading through them feels like traveling through an alternative universe where common and momentary lapses of judgment end up ruining a career in government service or top secret contracting.
After a hearing in September 2010, in a secret courtroom presided over by administrative judge Edward W. Loughran, the applicant in case no. 09-05252 was denied a security clearance because his risky real estate investments had gone bad. The applicant, according to court records, had bought three houses in a short period of time “without the financial resources to handle a downturn in the market,” the judge ruled. His bad luck began when one of his renters became sick, was hospitalized, and moved out. Without the rental income, he fell behind on his mortgages. Eventually he was forced into foreclosure. He argued in the secret court that he had paid off one mortgage and gotten out of the real estate business and that his good character and strong prior job performance should mitigate what the applicant believed was a decision to take a normal business risk. The judge concluded otherwise: because of lingering debt, his financial problems “were not resolved and were not under control.” His clearance was denied.
In another case, an Iranian who had immigrated to the United States in the early 1980s and had become a U.S. citizen in the early 2000s was denied a clearance after having had one for several years because he had visited Iran, did not surrender his Iranian passport, and never renounced his citizenship. By law he is not required to do any of those things. But security officers viewed his actions as a risk, considering Iran’s hostility to the United States, its attempt to obtain weapons of mass destruction, and its funding of terrorism.
People can also lose their clearances for alleged criminal conduct, even if the charges are dropped or dismissed, or if a jury returns a verdict of not guilty. This is what happened to a defense contractor who had been previously brought before a military court-martial eight years earlier on allegations that, as an officer, he had participated in a gang rape of an enlisted female. Defense challenges against the lab that performed the DNA testing, and against the credibility of the alleged victim, resulted in an acquittal. But the security clearance judge, having reviewed the record, said it still appeared that the man had had sex with the enlisted female, was drunk at the time, and had conspired with the two other officers to lie about what happened.
The elaborate lengths to which Top Secret America goes to keep its secrets extend to the paper they are written on, too. Every day an unmarked van slogs through rush hour traffic as it collects classified documents at each stop on a day-long circuit between the Pentagon, Fort Meade, and Boyers, Pennsylvania, a hardscrabble town of mining families fifty miles north of Pittsburgh. As the four-lane highway gives way to a two-lane mountain road, the view changes from glass, high-tech office buildings to Dollar Stores, POW flags, dog pens, mobile homes, and tiny cemeteries.
One winter day, I followed the same route into the mid-Atlantic outback. As the forest thickened and the road narrowed even further, not a single sign helped lead the way to the biggest employer in the region. The nation’s largest secure bunker is announced by nothing more than a small sign that reads Plant Entrance. But one turn off the road and hundreds of parked cars appeared, as did an instruction: Stop for Vehicle Search. A guard opened the hood, trunk, and side doors before I was allowed to drive down a paved road into the gaping mouth of a towering limestone mountain, its face dripping dark browns as the snow melted.
The security guards did not look happy as they swung open the twenty-foot-tall gate. A driver’s license was exchanged for a security badge and a fire extinguisher. Nothing was said about the fire extinguisher, so I placed it on the dashboard. At the first turn into the dark warren of two hundred fifty underground tunnels, it rolled onto the floor with a thud.
A second security badge was required to meet Kathy L. Dillaman, a lifelong Boyers resident and the granddaughter of a miner who helped carve out the 145,000-acre cavern. She works as associate director of investigations for the Office of Personnel Management, Federal Investigative Services Division.4
The walls of her office are the rough limestone and slate of the mountain. This combination of materials makes the mountain nuclear blast–resistant, which is why the government originally took an interest in it back in the 1960s during a particularly tense period of cold war nuclear weapons anxiety. The old bunker is now owned by Iron Mountain Inc.5 The rare lack of humidity and ultraviolet rays makes the old mine a perfect place to store Bill Gates’s photo archives, Warner Brothers’ movie collection, and endless stacks of classified dossiers compiled in the course of background investigations for the cast of people who, through the years, have populated Top Secret America.
Such dossiers are collected and stored here as part of the security clearance process: the applications, fingerprint cards, head shots, interview notes, polygraph results, credit and records checks, memos and adjudications. In 2010, another 2.2 million dossiers were added, some stored electronically but thousands still sent to the mountain in bright blue paper folders.
When after 9/11 so many contractors required so many security clearances that the system had to shut down, the solution was to hire private contractors who themselves needed clearances. As a result, five out of seven employees even inside the mountain work for someone other than the government.
Given the metastasis of Top Secret America, requests for top secret clearances have continued to increase at a faster rate than any other type of clearance, and they take ten times longer to complete than merely secret-level clearances. Where once there was a 392-day backlog, now a top secret clearance usually takes a little over two months to complete, Dillaman said.
While the U.S. government has spent millions to accelerate the clearance process, much of it is still done by hand by clerks from the small towns around Boyers. “It’s a good job,” said Chris DeMatteis, a longtime employee with the Federal Investigative Services Division. “Beats rolling pizza dough. Don’t put that in. We don’t want to get our pizza delivery guy mad.” The pizza man has a special status at Iron Mountain because no fire is allowed inside, hence no cooking is permitted.
The offices inside the bunker have the feel of a rural postal facility. Daily, hundreds of clerks in bulky sweaters and tennis shoes shuffle, collate, and sort millions of pieces of paper sent in by local police and other agencies that are themselves not yet electronic-based. Stacks of four-by-six-inch paper fingerprint cards come in on shipping pallets and are digitally scanned and then shredded. Such stacks grew much larger after 9/11, when a new law required everyone who regularly entered a federal building, even the guy who delivers bottled water or pizza, to have his fingerprints on file.
Despite all the money and effort spent on automation, only five agencies, including the army, are able to send all files electronically to Dillaman’s staff; all the others still mail in paper records. The paper records are kept in the stacks of blue folders lining one section of the cave. The folders are bar-coded, and every time a file moves through one of the twenty or so workstations in the building, its transit is logged into a computer in hopes of keeping track of it.
Near the end of the tour, Charles J. Doughty, “vice president—The Underground” for Iron Mountain Inc., escorted me to Data Bunker 220. It was located along one of the tunnels, and large stone bollards had been placed in front of the door, just in case any unauthorized vehicle made it this far into the mountain undetected.
Data Bunker 220 is Iron Mountain’s state-of-the-art data center, an electronic storage room like the hundreds of others that have sprung up since 9/11 to back up, and store off-site, the millions and millions of new files that exist simply because more and more people need security clearances. The data center inside the mountain, the vice president of The Underground says, is one of the safest places on earth.
Behind steel doors and reinforced glass are the racks of servers and hard drives where the backup electronic records live.
The huge number of drives and servers found within Iron Mountain has its counterpart in the gigantic, windowless warehouselike buildings throughout Top Secret America. “There’s terabytes and terabytes of data,” explained Chris Crosby, senior vice president at Digital Realty Trust, a company that owns over sixteen million square feet of data center space in North America and Europe. “Data is finite. It goes somewhere. It’s the infrastructure of the information age. It’s our version of the railroad.”
Inside Iron Mountain’s Bunker 220, the Network Operations Center monitors a room of computer servers twenty-four hours a day. It has the feel of any other watch center. CNN is on one screen. On another, there are rows of boxes filled with codes. As I stood staring at the gibberish on the screen, many of the lines of data began flashing red, signaling a problem with the servers. But Doughty looked unfazed, so I tried to look unfazed, too, as I stood 250 feet underground in a hermetic bubble of limestone with only one escape exit, silently calculating my distance from the fire extinguisher sitting on the car floor.