Offices of DCS Task Group Tall Oak, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington—June, Three Years Before the Crunch
Very few of the subjects of Tall Oak CI investigations were in the nonofficial cover (NOC) category or clandestine agents. But with sufficient evidence, the Americans whom the foreign agents had used as assets could be prosecuted, or more often than not, turned. Turning an asset into a double agent was difficult, complicated, and stressful, particularly for the assets. As a handler, Phil spent much of his time trying to distinguish fact from fiction. A lot of his work required him to develop a level of trust with “assets” who had already proven themselves to be entirely untrustworthy to the other side.
Phil worked at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. The nearest town was DuPont, a small bedroom community. More than half of its residents were Fort Lewis officers and NCOs who lived off-post. Phil’s apartment was in DuPont, not because he particularly liked the town, but because he disliked long commutes in traffic. The four-apartment building had two floors, and his modest two-bedroom apartment was on the second floor.
The DIA’s counterintelligence (CI) agents could do some things inside the United States that the CIA couldn’t. Under the National Security Acts of 1947 and 1949 the CIA was barred from domestic intelligence gathering. Ironically, the Tall Oak intelligence reports went “up the pipe” to the CIA just as if they had been produced by CIA agents. Phil didn’t mind being a surrogate for the CIA, especially if he was a well-paid surrogate. And his work didn’t pose any ethical dilemmas. The subjects of his investigations were nearly all foreign nationals who were trying to steal American secrets—most often industrial secrets.
In 2012, a reorganization within the DIA created the Defense Clandestine Service (DCS). To the Tall Oak staff, the change mostly meant a change of business cards and stationery. Tall Oak shifted from a DIA “Project” to a DCS “Task Group.” (Tall Oak was never a separate compartment, but now its name could be spoken outside DIA circles.)
The DCS had an emphasis on languages and gave hiring preference to agents with language proficiency. They sought people who spoke Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, Dari, Hindi, Turkish, Tajik, Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, but it was an open secret that the main emphasis of the DCS was watching China and Iran.
Phil’s officemates were Brian Norton (an electronics wizard), Clarence Tang (a Chinese linguist), and Scott Paulsen (a Russian linguist). The section chief was Hal Jensen, a crusty old vet who had been with the DIA’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) for eight years before it was rolled into DCS. With no path to career advancement unless he moved, he described himself as “a GG-13 for life.” At sixty-three, he had long been eligible to collect his twenty-year military pension and could have already collected a DOD civilian pension as well. But he was waiting to turn sixty-five, so that he could “triple dip” and collect Social Security, too. (He had also accumulated forty-plus quarters in the Social Security system.) For his planned retirement, he had a cabin waiting for him near St. Maries, Idaho. Jensen was fond of saying, “I’m delaying my retirement just to keep you contractors honest, and of course for the great coffee.”
Even though they spoke different languages, Clarence and Scott were buddies, since they were both prior service 98G MOS Army Intelligence linguist NCOs. They had both attended the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California, at the same time, and they had both transitioned to the DCS when they were E6s. The 98Gs (or “Golfs,” as they called themselves) tended to be clannish and were some of the Army’s most highly educated NCOs. A surprising number of them had master’s degrees in foreign languages before joining the army. And until recruiting policies changed in 2011, a few of them were age-waivered to be able to enlist after their thirty-fifth birthday.
Phil and Hal became friends quickly, even though they had been born thirty years apart. Their bond was rooted in the fact that they both got their start in tactical SIGINT (officer specialty code thirty-five career-tracked) and had eventually migrated into the CI/HUMINT field.
The offices for DCS Task Group Tall Oak–Washington were inside one of the three Stryker Brigade headquarters at Fort Lewis. Three of the U.S. Army’s seven Stryker Brigades were based at JBLM. The brigade headquarters building was the ideal place for the Tall Oak Section to hide its SCIF (spoken “skiff”) in plain sight. It was already classified as a “U.S.-Controlled Facility,” so that made SCIF accreditation easier. The Tall Oak staff could walk in and out of the building at any hour of the day or night in civilian clothes without arousing any suspicion.
The Tall Oak–Washington outer office measured only ten feet by ten feet and had just one small desk, a coat rack, a wall-mounted set of horizontal cubby shelves, and a pistol-clearing tube. Its main purpose was to shield the SCIF inner door from the view of casual passersby in the hall. The outer door was solid core oak and had a cipher lock. The outer office was their nondiscussion area, where classified discussions were not authorized because it lacked adequate sound attenuation.
Between the outer office and the SCIF itself was a six-by-six-foot security vestibule. This vestibule was monitored with a closed-circuit television camera and was controlled by an electronic latch release with a loud buzzer during the day, and by a second cipher lock with a distinct combination after hours. Then came the heavy steel vault door itself.
Behind the proverbial “Green Door,” the SCIF was a drab, windowless space that felt claustrophobic despite the high ceiling. The only large adornments were two large maps—a world map and a map of the Pacific Northwest—mounted on foam-core backings. There were two OPSEC reminder posters, a DCS core values poster, and a DCS mission statement poster. The office’s only decorative ficus tree with plastic leaves looked comically out of place. Years before Phil arrived, some wag had taped a sign reading, DO NOT OVER-WATER onto its trunk.
The SCIF was permeated with the smell of coffee but also had a faint smell of tobacco, which came from Hal Jensen’s clothes. (He still grumbled about being forced to smoke outdoors.) The SCIF was not a quiet place. There was the constant hum of the fluorescent light fixture ballasts and the whir of more than a dozen muffin fans, which were cooling the many computers. The other noise source in the SCIF was the constant soft rushing sound of the DIAM-mandated white-noise generators, made by a company called Florida Sound Masking. This system was designed to foil any potential eavesdropping.
The SCIF’s Comm Center was dominated by a three-sided ring of eight-foot tables. Atop these tables were six computer monitors, two large tabletop printers, a document scanner, a Defense Red Switch Network (DRSN) telephone, and a STU-III secure telephone with an attached speakerphone. The six prominently labeled monitors each had a specific communications and data retrieval function: JWICS, DCS WAN, SIPRNet, Tall Oak LAN/Operations Net, READOUT Multi-Net, and NSANet. Because Tall Oak was a “multiple INTs” shop, it had better connectivity than many U.S. Army command headquarters.
Emanations security was an obsession in the American intelligence community in part because they had exploited emanations so thoroughly in East Germany in the 1960s. Recognizing their own vulnerability, TEMPEST teams did regular sweeps of all SCIFs, using a strange-looking assortment of spectrum analyzers with specialized antennas.
Adjoining the Comm Center was a 230-square-foot conference room containing a long oak table topped by a large triskelion-shaped Polycom speakerphone. A twenty-four-inch flat-panel monitor with integral camera was mounted on the partition wall that divided the conference room from the Comm Center. This recent addition was an encrypted video system that could be linked directly to the other Tall Oak offices or to a Defense Intelligence Operations Coordination Center (DIOCC) Workroom in the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center (DIAC) at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling (JBAB) in Washington, D.C.