Permanent Record(40)
When the phone rang to signal that something was broken, and bouncing a server didn’t fix it, he’d just report it to the day shift. Essentially, his philosophy (if you could call it that) was that the night shift had to end sometime and the day shift had a deeper bench. Apparently, however, the day shift had gotten tired of coming in to work every morning to find Frank’s feet up in front of the digital equivalent of a dumpster fire, and so I’d been hired.
For some reason, the agency had decided that it was preferable to bring me in than to let this old guy go. After a couple of weeks of working together, I was convinced that his continued employment had to be the result of some personal connection or favor. To test this hypothesis I tried to draw Frank out, and asked him which CIA directors or other agency brass he’d been with in the navy. But my question only provoked a tirade about how basically none of the navy vets high up at the agency had been enlisted men—they’d all been officers, which explained so much about the agency’s dismal record. This lecture went on and on, until suddenly a panicked expression came over his face and he jumped up and said, “I gotta change the tape!”
I had no idea what he was talking about. But Frank was already heading to the gray door at the back of our vault, which opened onto a dingy stairwell that gave direct access to the data center itself—the humming, freezing night-black chamber that we sat directly on top of.
Going down into a server vault—especially the CIA’s—can be a disorienting experience. You descend into darkness blinking with green and red LEDs like an evil Christmas, vibrating with the whir of the industrial fans cooling the precious rack-mounted machinery to prevent it from melting down. Being there was always a bit dizzying—even without a manic older guy cursing like the sailor he was as he dashed down the server hall.
Frank stopped by a shabby corner that housed a makeshift cubicle of reclaimed equipment, marked as belonging to the Directorate of Operations. Taking up almost the entirety of the sad, rickety desk was an old computer. On closer inspection, it was something from the early ’90s, or even the late ’80s, older than anything I remembered from my father’s Coast Guard lab—a computer so ancient that it shouldn’t even have been called a computer. It was more properly a machine, running a miniature tape format that I didn’t recognize but was pretty sure would have been welcomed by the Smithsonian.
Next to this machine was a massive safe, which Frank unlocked.
He fussed with the tape that was in the machine, pried it free, and put it in the safe. Then he took another antique tape out of the safe and inserted it into the machine as a replacement, threading it through by touch alone. He carefully tapped a few times on the old keyboard—down, down, down, tab, tab, tab. He couldn’t actually see the effect of those keystrokes, because the machine’s monitor no longer worked, but he struck the Enter key with confidence.
I couldn’t figure out what was going on. But the itty-bitty tape began to tick-tick-tick and then spin, and Frank grinned with satisfaction.
“This is the most important machine in the building,” he said. “The agency doesn’t trust this digital technology crap. They don’t trust their own servers. You know they’re always breaking. But when the servers break down they risk losing what they’re storing, so in order not to lose anything that comes in during the day, they back everything up on tape at night.”
“So you’re doing a storage backup here?”
“A storage backup to tape. The old way. Reliable as a heart attack. Tape hardly ever crashes.”
“But what’s on the tape? Like personnel stuff, or like the actual incoming intelligence?”
Frank put a hand to his chin in a thinking pose and pretended to take the question seriously. Then he said, “Man, Ed, I didn’t want to have to tell you. But it’s field reports from your girlfriend, and we’ve got a lot of agents filing. It’s raw intelligence. Very raw.”
He laughed his way upstairs, leaving me speechless and blushing in the darkness of the vault.
It was only when Frank repeated this same tape-changing ritual the next night, and the night after that, and on every night we worked together thereafter, that I began to understand why the agency kept him around—and it wasn’t just for his sense of humor. Frank was the only guy willing to stick around between 6:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. who was also old enough to know how to handle that proprietary tape system. All the other techs who’d come up in the dark ages when tape was the medium now had families and preferred to be home with them at night. But Frank was a bachelor and remembered the world before the Enlightenment.
After I found a way to automate most of my own work—writing scripts to automatically update servers and restore lost network connections, mostly—I started having what I came to call a Frank amount of time. Meaning, I had all night to do pretty much whatever I wanted. I passed a fair number of hours in long talks with Frank, especially about the more political stuff he was reading: books about how the country should return to the gold standard, or about the intricacies of the flat tax. But there were always periods of every shift when Frank would disappear. He’d either put his head into a whodunit novel and not lift it until morning, or he’d go strolling the halls of the agency, hitting the cafeteria for a lukewarm slice of pizza or the gym to lift weights. I had my own way of keeping to myself, of course. I went online.