The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

'He's told us something else. He wants all his reports to be handled physically,
not by cable. If we don't agree, he doesn't do business. Okay, technically
that's no problem. We've done that before with agents of this caliber. The
nature of his information is such that immediacy is not required. There's daily
air service to and from Japan via United, Northwest, and even All Nippon Airways
straight into Dulles international Airport.'
'But . . .' Cabot's face twisted into a grimace.
'Yeah.' Jack nodded. 'He doesn't trust our communications security. That scares
me.'
'You don't think . . . ?'
'I don't know. We've had very limited success penetrating Soviet ciphers for the
past few years. NSA assumes that they have the same problems with ours. Such
assumptions are dangerous. We've had indications before that our signals are not
fully secure, but this one comes from a very senior guy. I think we have to take
this seriously.'
'Just how scary could this be?'
'Terrifying,' Jack answered flatly. 'Director, for obvious reasons we have
numerous communications systems. We have MERCURY right downstairs to handle all
of our stuff. The rest of the government mainly uses stuff from NSA; Walker and
Pelton compromised their systems a long time ago. Now, General Olson over at
Fort Meade says they've fixed all that, but for expense reasons they have not
fully adopted the TAPDANCE onetime systems that they've been playing with. We
can warn NSA again – I think they'll ignore this warning also, but we have to do
it – and on our end, I think it's time to act. For starters, Sir, we need to
think about a reexamination of MERCURY.' That was the CIA's own communications
nexus, located a few floors below the Director's office, and using its own
encrypting systems.
'Expensive,' Cabot noted seriously. 'With our budget problems . . .'
'Not half as expensive as a systematic compromise of our message traffic is.
Director, there is nothing as vital as secure communications links. Without
that, it doesn't matter what else we have. Now, we've developed our own one-time
system. All we need is authorization of funds to make it go.'
'Tell me about it. I haven't been briefed in.'
'Essentially, it's our own version of the TAPDANCE. It's a one-time pad with
transpositions stored on laserdisk CD ROM. The transpositions are generated from
atmospheric radio noise, then superencrypted with noise from later in the day –
atmospheric noise is pretty random, and by using two separate sets of the noise,
and using a computer-generated random algorithm to mix the two, well, the
mathematicians say that's as random as it gets. The transpositions are generated
by computer and fed onto laser-disks in realtime. We use a different disk for
every day of the year. Each disk is unique, two copies only, one to the station,
one in MERCURY – no backups. The laser-disk reader we use at both ends looks
normal, but has a beefed-up laser, and as it reads the transposition codes from
the disk, it also burns them right off the plastic. When the disk is used up, or
the day ends – and the day will end first, since we're talking billions of
characters per disk – the disk is destroyed by baking it in a microwave oven.
That takes two minutes. It ought to be secure as hell. It can only be