I CAME UP with the idea for this book—the contract was drawn up, the research was begun, the first interviews with sources were conducted—before the world had heard of Edward Snowden; before metadata, PRISM, and encryption entered the banter of common conversation; before cyber attacks—launched by China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, organized crime groups and, yes, the United States government—became the stuff of headline news seemingly every day. My proposal was to write a history of what has broadly come to be called “cyber war,” and my interest in the idea grew as the stories piled up about Snowden and the thousands of documents he leaked, because it was clear that few people, even among those who studied the documents closely (I suspect, even among those who wrote about the documents, even Snowden himself) knew that there was a history or, if they did, that this history stretched back not a few years but five decades, to the beginnings of the Internet itself.
This book can be seen as the third in a series of books that I’ve written about the interplay of politics, ideas, and personalities in modern war. The first, The Wizards of Armageddon (1983), was about the think-tank intellectuals who invented nuclear strategy and wove its tenets into official policy. The second, The Insurgents (2013), was about the intellectual Army officers who revived counterinsurgency doctrine and tried to apply it to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, Dark Territory traces the players, ideas, and technology of the looming cyber wars.
On all three books, I’ve had the great fortune of working with Alice Mayhew, the legendary editor at Simon & Schuster, and it’s to her that I owe their existence. The seeds of this book were planted during a conversation in her office either in December 2012 or January 2013 (just before or just after publication of The Insurgents), when, trying to nudge me into writing another book, Alice asked what the next big topic in military matters was likely to be. I vaguely replied that this “cyber” business might get serious. She asked me more questions; I answered them as fully as I could (I didn’t really know a lot about the subject at the time). By the time the meeting ended, I was committed to looking into a book about cyber war—first, to see if there was a story there, a story with characters and a narrative pulse. It turned out, there was.
I thank Alice for prodding me in this direction and for asking other pointed questions at every step along the way. I thank the entire S&S team on the project: Stuart Roberts, Jackie Seow, Jonathan Evans, Maureen Cole, Larry Hughes, Ellen Sasahara, Devan Norman, and, especially, the publisher, Jonathan Karp. I thank Fred Chase for scrupulous copyediting. I thank Alex Carp and Julie Tate for diligent fact-checking (though I bear total responsibility for any errors that remain).
Additional support came from the Council on Foreign Relations, where I was the Edward R. Murrow press fellow during the year when I did much of the book’s research. I thank, in particular, the fellowship’s leaders, Janine Hill, Victoria Alekhine, and, my energetic assistant during the year, Aliya Medetbekova, as well as the Council’s many fellows, staff specialists, and visiting speakers with whom I had spirited conversations. (I should stress that neither the Council nor anyone at the Council had any role whatsoever in the book itself, beyond providing me a nice office, stipend, and administrative assistance.)
In the course of my research, I interviewed more than one hundred people who played a role in this story, many of them several times, with follow-ups in email and phone calls. They ranged from cabinet secretaries, generals, and admirals (including six directors of the National Security Agency) to technical specialists in the hidden corridors of the security bureaucracy (not just the NSA), as well as officers, officials, aides, and analysts at every echelon in between. All of these interviews were conducted in confidence; most of the sources agreed to talk with me only under those conditions, though I should note that almost all of the book’s facts (and, when it comes to historically new disclosures, all the facts) come from at least two sources in positions to know. I thank all of these people: this book would not exist without you.
I also thank Michael Warner, the official historian of U.S. Cyber Command, and Jason Healey and Karl Grindal of the Cyber Conflict Studies Association, whose symposiums and collections of declassified documents were instrumental in persuading me, at an early phase of the project, that there was a story, a history, to be told here.
This is my fifth book in thirty-three years, and they’ve all been guided into daylight by Rafe Sagalyn, my literary agent, who has stood by throughout as taskmaster, counselor, and friend. I thank him once again, as well as his patient assistants, Brandon Coward and Jake DeBache.
Finally, I am grateful to my friends and family for their encouragement in so many ways. I especially thank my mother Ruth Kaplan Pollack, who has always been there with support of various kinds; my wife, Brooke Gladstone, who has loomed as my best friend, life’s love, and moral compass since we were both barely out of our teens; and our daughters, Sophie and Maxine, whose integrity and passion continue to astonish me.