Two days later General Ward took the daily USAF plane from Brize Norton to the Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington where he was greeted by his opposite number, Donald Knuth, Director of Civil Communications Security. Some time before, when he was working in the Federal Communications Commission, Knuth had spent a week as the guest of Ward at a seminar in the Signals College, and their liking for each other had made cooperation easy in the past ten days when they both, equally unexpectedly, had found themselves in charge of safeguarding their countries' communications security.449Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGpmKC7qw25
Knuth had asked his friend to come a full day before the official meetings began and to stay at his home because he was determined to use the 24 hours before the formal meetings on Monday to brief and debrief the General as thoroughly as possible; thus he hoped to gain an ally in the bureaucratic infighting which was going on as America girded herself for conflict with an unlikely enemy. Knuth's temporary right to attend meetings of the National Security Council enabled him to provide Ward with an authoritative and wide-ranging view of US policies.
After the shooting in Chicago the race riots all over the country had been contained within a week, but nothing was done to heal the breaches, only to paper over the cracks. Race relations were at their worst since the Civil War; all black Americans were united as they had never been before and yet the flood of immigrants (especially blacks from all corners of Africa) was quite unchecked. The electric fence ("that Maginot mirage") was still far from finished and the Sanctuary movement was now settling thousands of African illegal immigrants into the United States week after week.
Sound tapes made secretly at meetings of the Anti-Racial Militants (ARM) showed that the immigrants were planning all kinds of subversion and giving aid and comfort to illegals, including taking over sections of cities, or even whole cities, and running them as "African" republics. They intended to push Obasea Chinelo as the 1st black candidate for President even though the Nigerian-born Chinelo was not constitutionally eligible. They also talked of an African commonwealth, with its headquarters in the "Black House in Monrovia, Liberia.
Even more serious was the undisputed fact that the plague of black rage had spread to vital US government services where the policy of integration had ensured a fair sprinkling of racial minorities. The CIA and the FBI, for example, were desperately trying to put their blacks into non-sensitive posts.
Knuth's own organization had been compelled to move some 150 blacks out of sensitive posts. They were gradually being replaced by less able whites who were regarded as "safe" by the Chief of Staff, General John A. Wickham.
So far, electronic interference had been widespread but not too serious, except for one incident. On Thanksgiving Day up in the Dakotas one of the old Minutemen missiles, which had no warhead, exploded on base having apparently been activated by remove control of its computerized firing system. This news had not reached the public--so far. Knuth planned to have all defense-related computers programmed to refer external commands instantaneously to a central manned computer that would confirm or deny the order.
The economic situation in the US was not encouraging. The Treasury Department, with support from the White House, was determined to make the debt settlement and the new IMF regime (now effectively run by the United States) appear as a stellar success. The big banks were playing along with this and there was the same talk in the USof an impending international trade boom as there was in Britain. But to date there was no sign of fulfilment; beneath the brittle smile of official optimism realization was dawning that the total disruption of trade with Latin America and the loss of millions of dollars' worth of investment was irreversible. This was particularly true in Latin America.
In Africa---except, obviously, for South Africa---the small weak economies had simply collapsed, precipitating a flood of illegal immigrants into the US. Stopping this flood was greatly preoccupying Congress; they believed that all of Africa was in a conspiracy to take over the southwest of the United States, and that an undeclared war was being waged against America.
The state Department viewed the Soviet overtures for economic collaboration as genuine. The US Ambassador in Moscow had reported the the USSR regarded getting meat into the Soviet industrial workers' diet as their top priority, and that meant getting American grain into their silos. The Commerce Department was anxious to have trade talks with the Soviets to fill the gap left by the cutoff trade with Africa. The White House, on the other hand, was much more skeptical and Reagan himself was openly concerned to see if he could use the Soviet Union's temporary pressing needs to patch up some lasting peace in Southern Africa in collaboration with them.
For a clear-sighted man like Knuth the outlook was very gloomy. The US had no friends in Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa it had been dragged into the vortex of an immense social upheaval which now affected every US city. Almost 1/4 of the population in the US was of doubtful loyalty in this struggle and they were being skillfully organized by ARM to disrupt the sophisticated and complex web of America's social economy.
That economy had just undergone drastic surgery and while it seemed to be making a recovery there was no doubt that confidence had been very badly shaken. It was on confidence and credit that the whole American economy was based; a successful attempt to undermine that confidence would be the greatest blow Africa could strike in its campaign against the West.449Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1FvJYjkSI4
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The morning after General Ward arrived in Washington Donald Knuth told him that he had just heard that Obasea Chinelo, last seen in public being carried off the podium at the University of Chicago after the attempt on his life, was going to make another of his series of broadcasts to the American people that morning.
"I think the balloon is about to go up," said Knuth, "and I only wish we were a big better prepared."
In spite of government pressure SCAN intended to carry the broadcast live from the CNN transmitter at 11:00, just before the Sunday intellectual ghetto hour on TV began.
As soon as Obasea came onto the screen both men found themselves wholly engrossed in his performance. He still sowed the effects of the assassination attempt---a light scar on his dark throat---but he retained the old charisma, combined with a certain sinister menace.
"In the lands of Africa," he began, "people are starving, especially in the cities where they have become accustomed to a life integrated into the industrialized trading world, dependent on imported food from America and Europe. But this has been cut off and though an appeal was made to Congress by the churches, Hollywood, and the Red Cross to send food, and though a Senate committee favored this, it was stopped dead by Senator Byrd with his pocket veto; into that capacious pocket went the lives of hundreds and thousands of men, women, and especially children. Why don't we feed ourselves? Because 80% of the land belongs to a few rich landowners who use it to graze cattle, to make hamburgers for the young people of the United States.
"But we have not been idle. The government of every country on the continent is being compelled to take away the large, nearly uncultivated estates from the very rich, who are often whites, and give the land back to the peasants. That is proving much easier now that the United States cannot protect the rich landowners, and everywhere our churches are helping us to ensure for us a bloodless and effective victory. But it will take two harvests at least before these peasants can hope to be able to do more than subsist on what they produce. How shall we feed the people of the cities till then?
"It is from these cities that the immigrants come into America. And it is to these cities that those who have already emigrated look back as home, and it is to these cities that they have sent their meager savings week by week---till two months ago, when your government stopped all remittances, at the same time that your Congress stopped all food.
"Today there are hundreds of thousands of people in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Miami, New York who are watching to see what will happen to their families in Bangui, Kigali, Harare, Addis Ababa, Mogadishu and Dar-es-Salaam. They will not stay quiet if they believe that they are being starved into submission.
"Personally, I am convince that is exactly what the Anglo-Saxon governments of Britain and America have planned. You may find this hard to believe, but listen for a moment to a secret but recorded conversation between the United States Secretary of the Treasury and his opposite number in Britain."
The screen filled with a closeup of Donald Regan and Nigel Lawson at the Bank/Fund meeting. Lawson's unmistakably clipped English accent was heard first.
"I know my policy is very tough, and it will hurt a lot of innocent and poor people. But it will be effective and speedy and so cause less pain in the long run."
Regan's slow, thoughtful response in his characteristic New England nasal twang was also unmistakable:
"We made a study of our capacity to withstand siege situations; this study also looks at the less developed countries shows that they would run into desperate trouble feeding their own people within three to four months if supplies of food from America were cut off. So I think we can coming out on top in any struggle based on economics. We wouldn't even be weakened. But I have two real anxieties: first of all, would any of our national public opinions be tough enough to use the food weapon till it brought results? Second, who would our banking system, which has so much of its assets tied up in the developing countries, survive our economic victory?"
The screen filled with a peculiarly unfortunate but authentic photograph of Nigel Lawson sneering down at an unseen audience. The tape of his voice continued: "First we must get the poverty-stricken states of the Sahel out of the Bretton Woods system, at least out of the IMF, where they do not belong. Then these institutions must be readapted to their original use, which is to support the credit, trade and commerce of the West."
Obasea reappeared on the screen, looking somewhat less sinister and slightly more mischievous: "Now that you know what is being done in your name, I give you an opportunity to repudiate these policies---certainly racialist, possibly genocidal. We are appealing for food and medical supplies to save human lives in the continent where Mankind was born. The gives you a chance to prove that even Americans feel they are part of the African community, and perhaps it will give many of you a chance to prove also that you are part of the Christian community, for the distribution of food and medicine in most of the big cities will be in the hands of our churches, which during these days of war have replaced so many weak and elitist governments as the effective administrators of all the social services, from schools to soup kitchens.
"We have appealed in much the same way to the non-Anglo-Saxon European countries and have not been ignored. The people forced the German Government to change and let the churches do the job. But the Court of St. James is still standing firm on the policies you've just heard from Nigel Lawson. Britain will suffer for this, as any country will suffer which refuses to recognize that there was only one Earth and it is the home of all Mankind.
"If you will not cooperate to run Africa for the good of all, how can you expect to run your cities, or your communications which link your continent, without our cooperation?"
Obasea stopped as suddenly as he had begun and immediately faded from the screen. Hebron Ooro smoothly took over and announced that SCAN had already negotiated a comment from Donald Regan, Sectary of the Treasury, who would be coming to the studio very shortly, and from Senator Byrd, who was planning to go to the studio near his home in North Carolina.
From the telephone log in his office it is clear that after Regan had received the call from SCAN he called Nigel Lawson in London, but on this occasion (and, indeed, thereafter) no record seems to have been kept.
While SCAN burbled on, waiting for Regan to arrive. Ward played back the video recording of the Lawson-Regan conversation. Eventually, after listening very carefully more than once, he pronounced: "There's no connection between the pictures and the soundtrack. The conversation was taped in an office and is slightly cut and almost surely genuine. That means that someone in charge of our most secret records is prepared to give them to enemies of this country. And I think it goes beyond that. In some of our work on civil communications security we have found evidence of leakages to the Anti-Racial Militants from the CIA, particularly from its antiterrorist wing which is in charge of dirty tricks, specializes in destabilizing unwanted governments, and has a horde of miniaturized antipersonnel explosives."
There was a shuffling on the TV screen as Secretary Regan took his seat. Appearing calm and completely in charge of the situation, he launched immediately into a virulent attack on ARM and denied that the conversation with Nigel Lawson had ever taken place, claiming that the tape was a piece of "voice forgery." Instead he reiterated the populist line that all these people wanted was more US down to pour down the rathole of their inefficient economies.
SCAN then turned to opponents of the hard line and interviewed a group of churchmen of several denominations who were strongly in favor of sending food and medical supplies to those in need, on grounds of Christian charity and simple prudence. One said he had collected more than $10,000 from his congregation in Ohio for the purchase of surplus food to be shipped to a sister church in Kenya. But he had been refused an export permit by order of Senator Byrd.
The last word on the program was with the Senator himself, who expressed his deep-felt conviction that by giving food and money to Africans the US government had pauperized them and ruined their agriculture. It was to prevent further degradation of these poor people that he had got Congress to accept his resolution forbidding the export of food to any country in default on its debts to the United States.
"But could you not permit food bought by church congregations in Ohio to be sent to fellow Christians in Kenya?"
The Senator slowly shook his great head and intoned: "Over my dead body."449Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡf7juggnkL8
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Early in the evening, Mark Fowler, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, dropped by at Donald Knuth's house to meet General Ward before going on to the airport to take a plane to Chicago where he had a conference early the next morning. It was the last and busiest day of the Thanksgiving holiday and just as a precaution Knuth turned on one of his TV screens to check the state of air travel to the Windy City. Filling the whole screen was the bald announcement: "All flights in and out of O'Hare Airport, Chicago, are cancelled." An immediate search for alternative flights via Milwaukee or Indianapolis revealed that both those airports were open, but then it emerged that there were no flights out of Washington. Further enquiries showed that about twelve of the country's main airports were closed because "their central computer was down." Normal service would resume as soon as possible.
Normal service did not resume for some time; such an interruption---for over three hours in all---on the busiest air travel night of the year hopelessly tangled the flights and hundreds of thousands of passengers spent the night dossing down in airports all over the United States. No official explanation was offered that night, but there was an unofficial rumor spread by TV that a thunderstorm in Rochester, New York had struck the Civil Aviation Authority's computer link and spread chaos down the line.
Knuth tried in vain to get some explanation from his new office at the National Security Agency, but could not get under the standard taped response of no comment; the duty officer's line was constantly engaged. His own office, as Director of Civil Communications Security, did not answer. Mark Fowler had no success with his office either, and finally came home.
Late that evening Knuth took a final look at the SCAN news in case of an announcement about the airports, and heard instead; "It has just been announced from Cleveland that Senator Robert Byrd had died suddenly of a heart attack. The Senator, aged sixty-eight, was stricken on returning to his home there from a television appearance at our downtown studios."
The announcer went on to say that the black network (Washington's clandestine radio) was also making an announcement at that moment. A rather stilted African voice said "The Anti-Racialist Militants much regret inconvenience caused to air travelers, but this is a necessary protest and warning of worse to come after the lying response by Secretary Regan to Obasea Chinelo's appeal this morning." There was a pause, and then the voice continued: "While we regret the death of Senator Byrd he must now know that by hardening his heart he stopped his pacemaker."449Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJvRKkBsF5O
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At 7:30 A.M. on Monday morning a car with a military driver picked up Knuth and Ward and drove them at high speed to Fort Meade in the Maryland outskirts of Washington, where the National Security Agency has its vast, sprawling headquarters. They were met by a group of uniformed officers. At their head was General Burns, a large florid southerner, who was military commander of Fort Meade and technical also Chief of Staff to Donald Knuth as the head of Civil Communications Security. Knuth immediately felt the tension between the two men, one a civil libertarian and the other a military disciplinarian. Knuth suggested that they should walk through the Field House on their way to is office, which provoked the usual low-voiced mutter about security checks, until Knuth took Ward by the arm and firmly guided him over to an immense windowless barn 100 yards away. In the neon-lit air-conditioned calm inside the building a full acre of identical computers sat silent and still, apart from an occasional flashing light and more frequent whirrings as tapes inexplicably spun and stopped. "A 200 million monitor capacity," General Burns said darkly. "By far the biggest in the world."
When everybody had assembled in Knuth's office Burns bullied his way into conducting the meeting. His main objective seemed to be to impress on Ward that his intelligence system monitored every form of electronic impulse created anywhere on earth, at a cost which was slightly greater than the total British defense budget. Why this mighty effort should involve the tapping of millions of ordinary Americans telephones and computers was never made clear. Burns's patronizing reference to the British "set-up" at Cheltenham as a "first-class regional effort," stung Ward into enquiring just what had gone wrong the previous evening when hostile elements had been able to disrupt the airways and incidentally murder a senator. Burns was quite unfazed: "We can't always act immediately in these peripheral areas; that is not only certain in the main strategic area of the Soviet nuclear threat, which is covered by a different computer bank. Yesterday was a holiday period and we're very short-staffed owing to some new regulations----not of my making. But all the information's right there in the computers, and we'll have it analyzed and know what action to take this morning."
Knuth tried to pull the conversation around to a more equal exchange of views between Ward and the main body of his colleagues. He himself began to explain that the staff shortages as the result of an edict that blacks with links to Africa must not be employed on sensitive intelligence work. His department had lost 25% of its trained staff, including a number of Somali emigres who provided the best computeroligists in America. The born-and-bred American negroes had been shuffled off to such harmless areas as population analysis.
Ward was asked to give some account of the British experience. As he was doing so an aide interrupted the meeting and summoned Knuth out, at the same time handing Burns a big buff envelope.
The envelope contained a printout of all messages received by the major civil airports and airlines, and their source, from Sunday noon till 3 p.m. All was normal until 12:45 and then for 1 hour the tape was blank; so was the backup tape. Both had been wiped on instructions received through the internal NSA system. "Oh my God!" screamed Burns.
Just at that moment a grim-faced Knuth came back into the room. He said that he had been called by the chief security officer at the New York Stock Exchange, who informed him that Wall Street had gone into a steep decline from the moment it opened and now, two hours later, still seemed to be in free fall. The Wall Street satellite had spread the infection worldwide within seconds, and a 1929 crash atmosphere prevailed at closing time in London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt; only Tokyo was safe because at this time it was still sound asleep.
"I was about to ask him," said Knuth, "why the hell he was telling me all this, when he informed me that they're blaming it all on my office because there's some evidence now that false figures were fed into the satellite for a period of about 30 minutes at the very beginning of the day when people were just getting settled after the holiday break."
Apparently the satellite had recorded sales of stock of all the big international banks at sharply lowered prices, and assumed that this could only mean that at least one of them was finally going to fold as a result of the African debt crisis. Then several of the industrial blue chip stocks were recorded as moving down sharply, and so the slide began.
It had proved nearly impossible in the flood of panic selling to check whether past figures had been accurately transmitted or not. But Chase Manhattan claimed very vigorously that none of their shares had been traded at any price at the time they were so drastically marked down, and indeed no record of such a transaction could be found---except on the satellite and therefore on the thousands of data screens around the world.
Knuth continued with a self-deprecating smile: "I rather simple-mindedly asked whether a correction couldn't be issued, but I was royally snubbed and told that denials and corrections were of no avail now; false prophecies could be self-fulfilling, and this one surely was. The simple fact we've got to face is that for most people in the business world the only reality of Wall Street is what's carried on the Wall Street satellite and transmitted to little electronic desk screens all over the world. Even the market analysts, whose lightest word moves empires, observe the world through the same little screen unquestioningly as if it were the real world, and so it becomes the real world.
"As guardians of civil communications it's our duty to keep everything real and true. I've already asked our New York office to come up with an explanation of how the satellite was tampered with, as I've little doubt that it was. We here must sit down at once and devise a means of making it tamper-proof."
There was clearly no point in Ward remaining in Washington any longer. Before he left he gave some confidential papers to Knuth on British experience with satellite tampering, but he knew that the Americans would re-invent the wheel in their own way.
As he was driven out to Dulles airport that evening in the Embassy Rolls, Knuth watched the SCAN roundup if the day's news on the car's TV set. There was an interview with Senator Byrd's doctor who confirmed that the Senator had had a pacemaker fitted just before the 1984 Presidential elections. This had been rendered inoperative on Sunday by a burst of electric energy (probably X-rays) directed at him from about 15 feet, probably while he was unlocking his front door. He apparently had felt nothing, but within one hour his heart suffered severe ventricular fibrillation and he dropped dead.
The Wall Street crash was the major news story, with the Dow-Jones index falling to a 10-year low and still falling at the close of business. It was represented as being a sign of business's lack of confidence in the debt settlement and in the new economic order which had resulted from that settlement, in spite of Regan's charge, made at a press conference, that ARM had created the crash via computer fraud. The Treasury Secretary gave some plausible evidence of false information being filed into the Wall Street satellite from an earth station in Nantucket. Knuth believed him, but clearly nobody else did, at least no one at Regan's press conference.
As Ward traveled back to London he methodically noted in his official record file his impressions and conclusions of the trip. All his worst fears about the isolation and vulnerability of the Anglo-American community had been confirmed. Could the US survive the hatreds it had stirred up, and the means of violence it provided so lavishly? Who knew the answer? But it was now an established fact that US intelligence was utterly unprepared for the struggle that it faced. It was geared to a nuclear war, or the prevention of such; it had no idea of how to cope with sophisticated disruption organized by a non-white people. It was even more vulnerable than the British, both because it was more highly computerized and because its society had been far more racially integrated and for longer than the British.
The White House was in little better shape than the intelligence community. It seemed to be concentrating on South Africa, admittedly a flashpoint, and certainly a major supplier of strategically important minerals and metals, but really a diversion from the main Africa/West struggle, which for the US centered on immigrant and black communities within its own cities. Maybe, noted Ward, the trip would not have been a total waste of time if he could persuade Whitehall and Downing Street that the British should not rely on America to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. The US had neither the will to do that no, Ward suspected, the power.449Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAfcZgsFmxc
The slump was spread from Wall Street to Main Street within days, leaving no one untouched. The rich new that shares dropped 20% and stood at less than 1/2 their market value on September 1, 1985. The middle-class knew that one supermarket on 5th Avenue had closed its doors and that the owner of the TV store round the corner had disappeared, leaving behind a mountain of debt to Sony, Zenith, and Merrill Lynch. Everyone knew that there were hard times for the foreseeable future and nobody knew who was to blame.449Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLBFZ8VkevX
Then, on Monday morning, December 21, 1985, the White House announced the results of the investigation into the events surrounding the crash on Wall Street. They gave substance to Regan's charge. False figures on trading in bank stocks had indeed been fed into the Wall Street satellite early on the first day of trading after the Thanksgiving holiday, when in fact no trading in those stocks had taken place at all.449Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmGW4GneZSo
The investigations at NSA and Wall Street focused at first on the assumption that the false figures had been fed to the satellite by an illicit ground station, but when no sign of this station could be found the investigators turned to cross-examining more vigorously the two operators on duty at the Wall Street ground station which normally fed the satellite. They were both Yale graduates, Americans by birth but their parents had fled Nigeria's 1967 Biafra War and settled in the US; they had both worked with the NSA until recently when they had been hired by Wall Street Satellite Inc. Their evidence couldn't be shaken and seemed to exonerate them from any responsibility. But late on the day of their second interrogation they left the office and were never heard from again.449Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQAoYHkSJ6U
The investigative committee, on the basis of some "further strictly classified information" provided by the White House had no doubt that these two men had in fact carefully prepared and carried out this criminal fraud, with its dire consequences for America and the rest of the world.
Press Secretary Speakes reported President Reagan as saying: "This is an act of treason comparable to passing nuclear secrets to the enemy, or stealing the gold in Fort Knox."449Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2uuBh1vZjN
