Alien Agenda: Why They Came, Why They Stayed Page 5

  When I transferred to work with NATO intelligence operations in Germany, Bob and I stayed friends and never lost touch.

  I had thought of asking Bob to help me vanish right before the black SUVs’ headlights but, as good and loyal a friend I knew that he was, it was too risky for him.

  Then one evening at a bar in Georgetown he told me was dying. A week later we met for lunch. I told him what I was up to and asked for his help. He not only agreed, he seemed delighted and said it sounded like great fun. I waited until he was dead to vanish from the US. His burial was about thirty years after he ceased to exist outside of government agencies.

  Soon after I went to NATO, Bob was promoted through a progression of jobs until he ended up the head of the most valuable military asset in the US arsenal. Bob ran an unnamed unit of computer experts who worked in a subbasement in the Library of Congress. They thought of themselves as the original geeks.

  Their missions ranged from the sublime to the outrageous. They routinely linked into orbiting satellites belonging to foreign powers, downloaded data, then replaced real data with what we wanted the owners of the satellites to believe. They once, on a lark, traced the financial transactions of a US senator who led a charge to unmask the CIA and make public all black operations. By the time the senator was to raise the issue in congress, the FBI, Treasury Department, and the senator himself received untraceable letters detailing deposits and transfers in foreign banks under various names and numbers implicating the senator in tax fraud, not to mention possible campaign contributions from shell companies linked to South American drug cartels. The note at the bottom of the e-mail the senator received simply read, “Have a Nice Day. The CIA.”

  I tell you this only so you can appreciate the genius of Bob and his digital warriors who protected the US and disrupted foreign and terrorist plots and threats. Their crowning glory was the nuclear facility in Iran.

  Back in 2008, the world looked on, impotent to prevent Iran from producing the ingredients for atomic weapons. While much political hyperbole and threats of possible sanctions were fed to the media, short of invading Iran, nothing stopped them from going their merry way toward making The Bomb: nothing in their way at all except for Bob Cleburne and a few computer nerds.

  Tantalizing hints began drifting to intelligence agencies around the world in 2009. By mid 2010 it was clear: something was afoul at Natanz, Iran’s super-secret, weapons-grade-uranium factory. Their plutonium production output was paltry. The factory, which cost hundred of billions of dollars, was not working the way it should, and no one knew why. For months the engineers scratched their heads, trying everything imaginable to return to schedule, but nothing worked. A few months later a Belarusian company working with Iran discovered a virus in the system. It turned out to be the most intelligent, lethal virus ever created, and its only target was the equipment at Natanz.

  Places like Natanz are secret. They have security both physical and digital to keep viruses out. The facility at Natanz was more secret than most because it was not connected to the Internet. No way could a computer virus infect its computers.

  This inconvenience was not a problem for Bob. His guys simply infected more than 100,000 computers that were on the Internet and within fifty miles of Natanz. The virus, called Stuxnet, simply waited quietly, attaching itself to every e-mail, every website, every piece of circuitry connected to these computers. At least one USB memory stick was inserted into one of the 100,000 infected computers and then plugged into a computer at Natanz. In programmer parlance, ‘that was all she wrote.’

  Over the next few days Stuxnet infected every circuit board in the factory and began looking for its targets. Using digital certificates of authorization stolen from JMicron and Realtek, it convinced the Natanz computer operating system (made by Siemens in Germany) that it was a resident program. Once connected to all relevant systems, Stuxnet went to work. It attacked the frequency converters (manufactured by a Finnish company, Vacon and an Iranian company, Fararo Paya) that ran the centrifuges.

  Stuxnet would order the centrifuges to speed up at inappropriate times and then slow them down too quickly. This erratic behavior damaged the converters, the centrifuges, and the bearings, and it corrupted the uranium in the tubes. At the same time, Stuxnet masked its antics from the plant operating and security systems.

  By the time the virus was discovered in June of 2010, it had spread to Bushehr, Iran’s nuclear-power plant construction. Upon being discovered, Stuxnet destroyed itself before it could be traced back to any source.

  In order to have pulled this off, Bob’s geeks needed to understand the details of the operating system from Siemens and the frequency converters from Vacon and Fararo Paya. This order grows taller. Fararo Paya is an Iranian factory so secret that the Iranian Atomic Energy Commission did not even know it existed.

  The fact remains, Iran is several years behind on their nuclear bomb, and it is being debated whether Iran should scrap the Bushehr power plant and start from scratch, as it has been determined that Stuxnet has the ability to take control and shut down the entire power grid. The idea that Stuxnet may be idling quietly on every PC in Iran makes them more than a little nervous.

  As a sidenote, you may see a satellite photo of Iran’s nuclear facility. You will notice it is aligned in the shape of chevrons pointing toward the southwest. Look behind the second one and you see a large area of desert. Look more closely and you can see that it too roughly forms a third chevron aligned with the others. That’s the bulk and heart of the nuclear production plant beneath about two hundred feet of earth.

  Bob and his boys can do about anything using compartmentalization and an army of unwitting programmers who produce innocuous lines of code that have no clear purpose.

  So, what did Bob do for me? He made some websites that house applications allowing me to tap into various computer systems in such a way security does not report an intruder or off-site link. The apps have a password decoder to deal with sites that routinely change passwords. This can be a little tedious. Sometimes it takes the app 15 or 20 seconds to dial in. Another handy feature my websites have is a search engine that allows me to type in individuals’ or department names and it brings up their computers and databases. In short, with any computer hooked to the Internet I can log into one of my websites and gather recent information about the hunt for me. It has saved my butt more than once.

  They will figure it out eventually, but when one of my sites is compromised, it creates a mirror website then destroys itself. I understand how it works and know enough about programing and the Internet to keep it current, but I would have never been able to create it. Thank Bob’s genius.

  Bob also set me up with a program he created for himself. It is really cool. Say I want the phone number or address for someone famous who doesn’t want cyberstalkers. I type in the person’s full name, approximate age, and as much of an address as I have. For example, if I wanted to find Bill Gates, I would type in his name, age 55-65, and Washington, USA, Microsoft and hit send. I go about my business, when the program’s cyber scouts find something they report back, and next time I log in to the website there might be four or five Bill Gates that fit the description. There’s a fair amount of information for each that the little snooping bots find at utility, cell phone, and insurance companies, and banks. It also compromises hospitals, schools, DMV, law enforcement, and almost all government agencies, but lately it is not as likely to break through firewalls. Like I said, Bob was a genius way ahead of his time.

  Bob’s gifts had a negative side effect; I had too much confidence in them and became complacent. I allowed myself to relax and enjoy my exile. I decided to see Europe a little bit at a time, and was in Germany the first time the SUVs almost caught up to me.

  I took the #28 inner-city express from Bamberg and changed trains in Nuremberg. I was not a full train ahead of the SUV with German plates. I stayed too long in Bamberg.

  Bamberg is a quiet, small town in Bavaria about fo
rty miles north of Nuremberg. It survived World War II because the Nazis had an artillery factory nearby and ringed the place with anti-aircraft guns to keep away allied bombers. Bamberg survived and maintains its old-world, Bavarian charm.

  It is home to several breweries, some of which have been making beer continuously for 800 years. They have had time to get it right. It has charming inns, pubs, and biergartens. All in all, it is a beautiful, tranquil place, and it sucked me in to its relaxed way of life.

  I travelled there using an Icelandic passport under the name of Fjalar Jonsson, a retired, freelance travel writer for Scandinavian airlines and cruise ships. I chose to be from Iceland for two reasons. Almost no one speaks Icelandic outside of its boundaries, and the system for naming children makes it difficult to trace people. For example, Fjalar Jonsson’s father’s name was Jon Stefansson. So the son’s last name is derived from the father’s first name. It makes almost no sense to most Westerners, but it is similar to the way people receive their names in Ethiopia and Mongolia. If I weren’t a blue-eyed, baldheaded, old, white man, I would use identities from these countries as well because their languages and abilities to track citizens is somewhat lacking by today’s standards.

  There was a biergarten in Bamberg a short walk from the Heinz Weyermann Brewery. Old men gathered daily to sit in squeaking, wood chairs and play cards on well-used, century-old tables. Hearts was the game of choice. Once I was invited to sit in on a game, I began showing up several times a week, as I am quite good at the game and someone always wanted me on their team.

  Bamberg’s spell of tranquility had me there nearly six weeks when I realized my Hearts partner, Gunther, might be trouble. Gunther was a great player. We usually mopped the floor with the opposition when we were partners, and when we weren’t we gave each other a challenge.

  Gunther spoke little, and when he did it was always about the game or something going on in Bamberg. Never did he mention family, friends, or pets. I should have known.

  One of the other players told me that Gunther was a retired government worker. He had worked for the BND, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or Federal German Intelligence Service. He also said Gunther had lately shown more interest in me than almost anything in ten years.

  That was all I needed to break the local spell. I paid cash for my room for another week and told the landlord I would be driving to surrounding towns and not back in Bamberg for two or three days.

  The next morning, when I left Bamberg, I was a blue-eyed, baldheaded, old man. Once in Nuremberg, the city famous for the Nazi War Tribunals, I shipped my largest suitcases at a Federal Express office to the Holiday Inn in Lisbon, Portugal to be held for a mister Aubrey Sproul. After returning Fjalar Jonsson’s rented VW, I bought a ticket to Paris. Audrey Sproul spent two days in Paris, then took the Elipsos train to Madrid and changed for Lisbon.

  Sometimes, things seem coincidental. They almost never are, but they seem like it. The Lusitania night train to Lisbon is a rolling hotel. If you want to spend the money, a grande suite offers a private shower and bath. I have a difficult time sleeping on trains, and booked a private room so as not to disturb other travelers in a shared compartment. When we pulled out of Madrid, I found a book wedged between seat and wall. It was a copy of The Cold War: A Global History with Documents, by Edward H. Judge and John W. Langdon. It contained, among other things, excerpts from James Forrestal’s diaries.

  I had read the diaries years before they had been gutted and sections replaced with forgeries.

  Forrestal’s political undoing had been his stance on Israel. He was fine with the 1947 treaty that made it an independent state. He was fine with the awkward truth. Its creation took land from neighboring Middle East countries that previously owned the land before the Western powers waved their magic map-wand and poof, a new country appeared between them.

  Forrestal felt that the financially strapped United States, faced with shrinking and dismantling its military in the face of Soviet imperialism, should not foot the bill for Israel’s new arms race with its neighbors. Forrestal made the mistake of saying as much, on more than one occasion.

  He was not anti-Semitic in the least. He was simply against spending money we did not have to support a newly formed foreign nation. Had that nation been African, Islamic, or Latin, any political backlash would have been easily weathered.

  Because it was Israel, a land created for its historic occupants, a people who had suffered the most horrific genocide the world has ever known, the backlash erupted into a volcano that blew in the doors of Congress and filled newspapers with misquotes and exaggerations.

  He became a target of pro-Israeli Zionist Jewish political groups and campaign contributors. Secretary of Defense would be the final legacy of a long career.

  As time passed it became clear Forrestal was not well. He wasn’t sleeping, and occasionally seemed to lose his composure and reveal fits of paranoia. Rumors were he believed he was being followed by ‘foreign men wearing gray topcoats, hats, and sunglasses’ and that these ‘dark, little men’ were Israeli secret service sent to intimidate him. When he entered a room, he would move from window to window, looking out while he spoke. At night he changed from a person who loved the fresh air of open windows to a suspicious, anxious man who triple-checked to make sure windows were locked.

  His contemporaries felt sorry for him as his physical and mental deterioration manifested. ‘The job was too much for any man,’ they said. Forrestal had lost weight, looked terrible and no longer seemed capable of being an effective Secretary of Defense. Truman asked for his resignation. Forrestal agreed and shortly thereafter was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital at the behest of Truman, Twining, and other worried peers.

  That’s the official story. Now hear this.

  Forrestal never thought he was being followed by Zionist or Israeli agents. The expunged portions of his diaries made that perfectly clear. He did believe he was being followed by ‘little, gray men with large, black eyes and hats to disguise large, hairless heads.’ In his diaries he called the aliens ‘them’ or the ‘windowmen.’ One of the first diary entries to be replaced after his death was about his first encounter with them.

  One night while reading in his home study he became nauseated and suffered a short period of paralysis. He felt like his brain was burning and swelling. The pressure nearly made him black out.

  But Forrestal was a tough man who hated to be out of control. He was much tougher than General Twining or even President Truman. He did not black out. Instead he struggled to regain control. He focused on moving the index finger on his right hand; when he thought he felt it move, he focused on the middle finger next to it. By the time he was able to flex all the fingers on his right hand, the burning in his brain subsided as he continued to struggle against the paralysis.

  Most men who suddenly lost body control, whose head dropped forward as their arms collapsed at their sides, would be terrified. Forrestal was more surprised than frightened. He thought perhaps he was having a stroke or heart attack or both. His surprise came from knowing he was healthy, and a medical calamity was the last thing he expected. He needed to regain control so he could find some help and go to a hospital.

  Forrestal only became terrified after he regained control of his neck and lifted his head.

  Three creatures stood before him. He knew what they were; he had seen their dead brethren in New Mexico. Forrestal’s original diaries may have contained the first recorded description of what today are known as ‘grays.’ As he gazed at them and them at him with their unblinking eyes, he felt the paralysis returning. His head began to drop and, with the sheer force of the remarkable will that was in Forrestal’s arsenal of human attributes, he forced the paralysis away.

  The three visitors’ expressions did not change, but something about their posture seemed to shrink away. As one, they moved toward an open window opposite the chair in which Forrestal sat.

  Forrestal watched as they, one by one, climbed up to the
second-floor window ledge and stepped into the night.

  The nausea subsided and within a few minutes Forrestal’s body, other than his heart rate, was back to normal. He slowly stood, checking his balance and muscle control. He walked to the window, looked into the darkness, then closed and locked it. Suddenly he was exhausted. While his mind raced with a million questions, and his heart had still not slowed to normal, he was physically drained, as if he had boxed fifteen rounds in the ring.

  He forced himself to make some notes and even sketch the face and head of one of the visitors.

  Even with his amazed mind racing, he fell asleep quickly and began to dream.

  In the dream, the three visitors floated outside his window. Smaller then when he saw them, they were somehow more menacing. They were talking to him, all three at once, filling his head but incomprehensible. Then his dream mind began to separate the voices, and he understood individual phrases, but he could not tell from which they came.

  He understood the word peace, and immediately doubled over and vomited on the window seat. When he heard something about commerce, he became so afraid he pissed his dream pants. And when their faces suddenly twisted into grotesque smiles and they spoke of helping humanity, he had never so strongly wanted to physically destroy any living thing as he did those three little horrors.

  The dreamed ended and he woke, his mouth tasting of bile. He got up to go to the bathroom and as his bladder emptied his heart filled with overwhelming desire to find and kill his visitors. He flushed the toilet, looked up, and quickly closed the bathroom window.

  That morning his body kept the day’s schedule, but he could not concentrate; his mind replayed the visit and the vivid dream. After his last appointment he made the first visitor-related entry into his diary. The page and a half he wrote was eventually replaced with a restatement of his thoughts about letting Israel sink or swim on its own and focus America’s resources on the Red Menace of the Soviet Union.