Permanent Record(46)
As if he were reading my mind, the director said, “This isn’t a punishment, Ed. It’s an opportunity—really. Someone with your level of expertise would be wasted in the war zone. You need a bigger station, that pilots the newest projects, to really keep you busy and stretch your skills.”
Everybody in class who’d been congratulating me would later turn jealous and think that I’d been bought off with a luxury position to avoid further complaints. My reaction, in the moment, was the opposite: I thought that the head of the school must have had an informant in the class, who’d told him exactly the type of station I’d hoped to avoid.
The director got up with a smile, which signaled that the meeting was over. “All right, I think we’ve got a plan. Before I leave, I just want to make sure we’re clear here: I’m not going to have another Ed Snowden moment, am I?”
15
Geneva
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818, is largely set in Geneva, the bustling, neat, clean, clockwork-organized Swiss city where I now made my home. Like many Americans, I’d grown up watching the various movie versions and TV cartoons, but I’d never actually read the book. In the days before I left the States, however, I’d been searching for what to read about Geneva, and in nearly all the lists I found online, Frankenstein stood out from among the tourist guides and histories. In fact, I think the only PDFs I downloaded for the flight over were Frankenstein and the Geneva Conventions, and I only finished the former. I did my reading at night over the long, lonely months I spent by myself before Lindsay moved over to join me, stretched out on a bare mattress in the living room of the comically fancy, comically vast, but still almost entirely unfurnished apartment that the embassy was paying for on the Quai du Seujet, in the Saint-Jean Falaises district, with the Rh?ne out one window and the Jura Mountains out the other.
Suffice it to say, the book wasn’t what I expected. Frankenstein is an epistolary novel that reads like a thread of overwritten emails, alternating scenes of madness and gory murder with a cautionary account of the way technological innovation tends to outpace all moral, ethical, and legal restraints. The result is the creation of an uncontrollable monster.
In the Intelligence Community, the “Frankenstein effect” is widely cited, though the more popular military term for it is “blowback”: situations in which policy decisions intended to advance American interests end up harming them irreparably. Prominent examples of the “Frankenstein effect” cited by after-the-fact civilian, governmental, military, and even IC assessments have included America’s funding and training of the mujahideen to fight the Soviets, which resulted in the radicalization of Osama bin Laden and the founding of al-Qaeda, as well as the de-Baathification of the Saddam Hussein–era Iraqi military, which resulted in the rise of the Islamic state. Without a doubt, however, the major instance of the Frankenstein effect over the course of my brief career can be found in the US government’s clandestine drive to restructure the world’s communications. In Geneva, in the same landscape where Mary Shelley’s creature ran amok, America was busy creating a network that would eventually take on a life and mission of its own and wreak havoc on the lives of its creators—mine very much included.
The CIA station in the American embassy in Geneva was one of the prime European laboratories of this decades-long experiment. This city, the refined Old World capital of family banking and an immemorial tradition of financial secrecy, also lay at the intersection of EU and international fiber-optic networks, and happened to fall just within the shadow of key communications satellites circling overhead.
The CIA is the primary American intelligence agency dedicated to HUMINT (human intelligence), or covert intelligence gathering by means of interpersonal contact—person to person, face-to-face, unmediated by a screen. The COs (case officers) who specialized in this were terminal cynics, charming liars who smoked, drank, and harbored deep resentment toward the rise of SIGINT (signals intelligence), or covert intelligence gathering by means of intercepted communications, which with each passing year reduced their privilege and prestige. But though the COs had a general distrust of digital technology reminiscent of Frank’s back at headquarters, they certainly understood how useful it could be, which produced a productive camaraderie and a healthy rivalry. Even the most cunning and charismatic CO will, over the course of their career, come across at least a few zealous idealists whose loyalties they can’t purchase with envelopes stuffed with cash. That was typically the moment when they’d turn to technical field officers like myself—with questions, compliments, and party invitations.
To serve as a technical field officer among these people was to be as much a cultural ambassador as an expert adviser, introducing the case officers to the folkways and customs of a new territory no less foreign to most Americans than Switzerland’s twenty-six cantons and four official languages. On Monday, a CO might ask my advice on how to set up a covert online communications channel with a potential turncoat they were afraid to spook. On Tuesday, another CO might introduce me to someone they’d say was a “specialist” in from Washington—though this was in fact the same CO from the day before, now testing out a disguise that I’m still embarrassed to say I didn’t suspect in the least, though I suppose that was the point. On Wednesday, I might be asked how best to destroy-after-transmitting (the technological version of burn-after-reading) a disc of customer records that a CO had managed to purchase from a crooked Swisscom employee. On Thursday, I might have to write up and transmit security violation reports on COs, documenting minor infractions like forgetting to lock the door to a vault when they’d gone to the bathroom—a duty I’d perform with considerable compassion, since I once had had to write up myself for exactly the same mistake. Come Friday, the chief of operations might call me into his office and ask me if, “hypothetically speaking,” headquarters could send over an infected thumb drive that could be used by “someone” to hack the comput ers used by delegates to the United Nations, whose main building was just up the street—did I think there was much of a chance of this “someone” being caught?