Not far away, the defenders prepare for the onslaught they know is coming during the two-day “Cyberdawn” exercise, one of the country’s premier electronic war games. It is run with the help of volunteers by the private firm White Wolf Security, which also arranges closed war games for some federal agencies. The chance to test their cyberskills has attracted groups from private companies as well as the U.S. military. Ten teams, including those from West Point and the Air Force Academy, have traveled across the country to take part in the game in the hopes of protecting a simulated digital network linking phone systems, Social Security numbers, and power grids on which 10,000 fictitious citizens rely.

The exercise pits teams from the U.S. military, the military’s service academies, corporations, and even teenage computer savants against live hackers who look surprisingly innocuous. Most could easily be mistaken for middle-aged accountants, in neat khaki slacks and button-up shirts. Others are sporting Puma training jackets and baseball caps. The de facto leader of the group has donned a stylish black bowling shirt with a name patch that reads, simply, “Hacker.” They have been instructed to use any means short of causing physical damage to exploit the vulnerabilities of their prey, placing them on the front line of what is an increasingly vital area of national security-the art and practice of offensive cyberwar.

Public debate about cyberspace revolves almost exclusively around questions of defense. Are retailers adequately protecting their customers’ credit card information? How can home computers be immunized against nettlesome viruses? When will the Pentagon more effectively be able to stop hackers in Russia and China from stealing military secrets?

Offensive cyberwar itself can encompass espionage, intercepting communications, and disabling computers and other infrastructure. The United States has those capacities, but the scope of the arsenal receives far less ink than the status of the country’s defense. The Obama administration issued a report on that aspect in May and announced the creation of a cybersecurity czar to organize defense. But the sections of the report that address the country’s offense remain highly classified, according to officials familiar with its contents. That’s frustrating to many people in the national security field. “The only way that deterrence works is if the other side knows that you have weapons and the willingness to use them,” says Charles Dodd, an expert in cyberwar at the security firm Nicor Global, who advises the House Armed Services Committee on cyberthreats sponsored by foreign nations.

The technical details behind these operations are very hush-hush, as disclosing them inevitably exposes the sources and methods of intelligence collection or military exploitation. The Pentagon, for instance, is keen to protect what hackers call “zero-day exploits,” an industry term for vulnerabilities that enemies do not yet know exist. “There’s a never-ending race for them,” says Tim Rosenberg, who founded White Wolf Security. “You find it; now how long can you use it before the rest of the world finds out about it and you’ve got to move on to the next vulnerability? It’s a never-ending game of leapfrog.”

Despite the secrecy, brief glimpses of several cyberwar incursions have surfaced recently. The New York Times reported this year, for example, that some of the best information the intelligence community has collected on the Iranian nuclear program came from a hack into that country’s computer networks. Remotely hacking into al Qaeda laptops, meanwhile, is within the purview of the nation’s spy agencies, says researcher and former intelligence officer Mathew Aide, who recently wrote The Secret Sentry, a book about the National Security Agency. He says that the NSA’s Tailored Access Operation Group employs a cadre of Navy computer technicians who spend their days in rooms protected by James Bond-esque retinal scanners deep inside NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland. But their activities are more often focused on monitoring communications than on remotely erasing hard drives or crashing power grids.

In 2004, Thomas Reed, a retired senior national security official, revealed the extraordinary story of how the CIA tricked the Soviet Union into stealing doctored software that later destabilized the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. That fancy bit of hacking caused a massive explosion in a wilderness section of the pipeline in 1982 that was visible from space and equivalent in size to that of a 3-kiloton nuclear weapon, according to Reed, who at the time sat on the National Security Council. Russian government officials have denied that the explosion was the result of a CIA hack. But in 2001 a special committee of the European Union’s Parliament accused the United States of using its Echelon global spy network to steal secrets that enabled U.S. companies to beat the European consortium, Airbus, to aircraft contracts in the mid 1990s.

Three former senior military officials involved in electronic warfare, speaking on the condition of anonymity for this article, say that the United States contemplated a cyberattack against the Iraqi financial system around the time of the 2003 invasion. The plan was abandoned after analysts predicted it could shatter confidence in the global banking system. “Seizing or freezing those funds during the war could cause havoc afterwards, even beyond the Middle East, if people felt that they couldn’t trust the banks to protect their money,” says one official.

Communications and computer networks are the most obvious targets for cyberwar. But as technology spreads into more areas of the human experience, the possibilities for hacking grow exponentially. One potential application could be hacking into an enemy dictator’s digital pacemaker, for instance, and making it go haywire. It is technologically feasible and would be the geek equivalent of a well-placed marksman’s bullet, hackers say. They call it “digital sniping.” Or hackers could break into an enemy country’s banking system and scramble or delete accounts to cause havoc in the streets and a collapse of confidence in the government. “Accessing networks or disabling physical infrastructure remotely is, frankly, cheaper and safer. People do not have to risk their lives stealing documents, and pilots don’t have to take antiaircraft fire bombing power stations,” says one former senior intelligence official familiar with aspects of offensive cyberwar.

White Wolf’s Rosenberg foresees a new generation of hybrid warriors. A former soldier and cyberwarfare go-to guy for the defense industry, he imagines one day deploying U.S. military cyberforces who might work in conjunction with special-operations units to remotely shut down power to a building prior to a military strike or hack into a security camera and kill the video feed. “There are all kinds of ways you can conduct cyber-physical operations,” says Rosenberg, who adds that the field should also be considered a career track, which would enable the military to rank skill levels.

However, launching cyberattacks is illegal, which makes it tricky to train what Rosenberg calls “cybersamurai.” The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm of the Pentagon, plans to build a national cyber-range to test offensive cyberweapons. The project is years from completion, but in the meantime the Obama administration allocated some $50 million in the defense authorization bill signed last month. Meanwhile, members of the military use exercises like Cyberdawn to improve their proficiency. In the course of defending themselves against professional hackers, soldiers and cadets learn skills that they hope will translate to the battlefield, where in the future they might be launching attacks of their own against enemy computer systems. “One of the questions we were constantly being asked is why don’t we teach offensive attacks,” says Col. Joe Adams, a former West Point professor who coached the academy’s cyberdefense team and is attending Cyberdawn. “They learn offensive skills, but they don’t get a chance to practice them. But they need to-it’s a perishable skill.”

Over time, specialists guarding the barricades begin to feel like Sisyphus, the mythical Greek condemned to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again. And on a number of occasions, the only defense is isolation. In 2007, amid a larger political dispute, hackers apparently based in Russia mounted cyberattacks against Estonia, shutting down ATMs and newspaper and government websites. To halt the onslaught, the Estonian government cut international Internet connections, isolating the country from the rest of the cyberworld.

At Cyberdawn, the military’s best-case scenario often involves sacrificing security in some realms in the hopes of defending others, says Col. Barry Hensley, director of the Army Global Network Operations and Security Center since May 2008. “In many cases, you cannot secure the entire network,” he says, noting that at least half of all computer systems in the Army have “had a security situation” within their networks at one time or another. “Am I concerned? I am,” he adds. “Few people know the predicament we’re in.”

The predicament is also a costly one. A malicious worm attack in the Pentagon’s computer networks this year has cost millions of dollars to mitigate. Last month, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn noted that though the Internet has shifted national defense paradigms, the technology itself is still young. “In terms of cybersecurity, we’re still in the era of biplanes and dirigibles.”

America’s technological dependence and vulnerability to attacks explain why officials are reluctant to discuss the U.S. cyberarsenal. “Right now we have the brain capacity to launch attacks, but we have neither the technology nor the personnel to fight off a counterattack, nor the means to know exactly where an attack comes from,” says James Lewis, a cybersecurity researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

An attack launched from Russia against Washington, for example, could be routed through North Korea or the United Kingdom, making it difficult if not impossible to ascertain the culprit. “So we have a capacity to hit back, but how do you know who to hit? And how do you know that the target you are hitting was actually responsible?” says Fred Rica, a cybersecurity expert with PricewaterhouseCoopers. Computer security officials from around the globe are still trying to piece together the origins of cyberattacks against Georgia that coincided with Russian military operations against the country in August 2008.

In other cases, the perpetrators are more obvious. The Chinese government, while publicly denying offensive cyberoperations, makes little effort to hide its activities, according to the U.S. intelligence community. Congressional leaders have been told for years that China is one of the most aggressive players in state-sponsored hacking. “The U.S. doesn’t define what constitutes an act of cyberwar, so countries like China-while publicly denying it-are going full speed ahead to take advantage of us,” says Nicor Global’s Dodd. “It would be good to see the government putting some money behind offensive capabilities to fight back.”

Back at Cyberdawn, the vulnerabilities are becoming apparent. Hacker Paul Asadoorian is deploying “agents” into his victims’ operating systems and begins running a customized attack program. “Now I can do all sorts of fun things,” he says as he pulls up the start menu of his opponent’s computer. “I can jump into the system-here’s a screen shot,” he says, pointing at the monitor as he takes note of what’s running on the network. This includes a screen shot of everything his victims are typing and reading. “And they have no idea I am here,” he says.

There’s no doubt the cyberwar learning curve is steep. An hour after the cyberattacks begin, the Air Force Academy team is desperately trying to shield its ersatz phone system. “I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before we start yelling at each other,” says Rob Cilla, a 19-year-old sophomore at the academy. Minutes later, the system has been hacked.

By Alex Kingsbury , Anna Mulrine

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/2009/11/18/us-is-striking-back-in-the-global-cyberwar_print.htm

Despite decades of FBI scrutiny, frenzied Red scares, blacklists, loyalty boards, and show trials aimed at ferreting out Communist infiltration, many, perhaps most, of those who acted in the service of the Soviet Union never had a Pumpkin Papers moment. But newly released documents from U.S. and Soviet archives show that hundreds of people, from the famous to the obscure, crossed paths with Soviet intelligence during the pre-World War II years. They include the country’s most famous physicist, Robert Oppenheimer, novelist Ernest Hemingway, and civil servants like Hiss. There were journalists, too, like Walter Lippmann, I. F. Stone, and Bernard Redmont, a former correspondent for U.S. News who has been denying spying allegations for more than a half century.

In the two decades since the end of the Cold War, various archives in formerly Communist countries, from Georgia to East Germany, have been opened to historians, who have eagerly pored over their files in the hopes of fitting more pieces into the Cold War’s most vexing jigsaw puzzles. (It is an unfortunate irony, some scholars note, that some of the best Cold War documents come from abroad rather than from the United States, where they are still classified.)

A new history of Soviet espionage in the United States during those critical pre-World War II years takes full advantage of a brief peek at one of the crown jewels of Cold War history, the brown and green file folders of the KGB’s American Department. Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press) was written by a pair of American Cold War scholars, John Haynes and Harvey Klehr, and a former KGB officer and journalist, Alexander Vassiliev.

For a tantalizingly brief two-year period in the early 1990s, Vassiliev was given access to Stalin-era KGB files in order to write about KGB operations. The new book shows how the Soviets went about the business of spying, its failures and successes, and, most interestingly, the names of the Americans from whom the KGB received information.

Since Vassiliev wasn’t able to take the originals outside the archive, he filled more than 1,100 notebook pages with the text and marginal notes of thousands of KGB files, often verbatim. Years later, he smuggled the notes out of Russia. Last month, Vassiliev donated the original notebooks to the Library of Congress. The project is not without controversy, partly because researchers have had access only to the notes which Vassiliev, a former Russian spy, took but also because the copies are often the only piece of evidence against those fingered as spies, most of whom are long dead.

But the Vassiliev notebooks are just one piece of the spying puzzle. In 1996, the National Security Agency released voluminous records of the top-secret Venona Project, including many partially decoded Soviet cables detailing spying. Because the cables used code names to shield the identities of KGB sources, they were of limited use to U.S. intelligence. What’s significant about the newly released Vassiliev documents is that they contain both the code names from the Venona cables and the actual identities.

A final confirmation? The most famous person who crops up in the new book and accompanying documents is Hiss, who had been convicted of perjury because of the Pumpkin Papers but was never convicted of more serious crimes.

The material in the Vassiliev notebooks corroborates the suspicion that Hiss was a longtime agent of Soviet military intelligence. That echoes the findings of Venona Project analysts, who concluded years ago that the code name “Ales” in the intercepted Soviet cables was “probably Alger Hiss.”

The KGB files also corroborate that Julius Rosenberg, who was executed for espionage in 1953 along with his wife, Ethel, was indeed a Soviet agent.

Other Americans are vindicated by Vassiliev’s KGB notes. For instance, they say that Robert Oppenheimer continuously refused to help the KGB, much to Moscow’s frustration. After a public investigation into his loyalty, Oppenheimer lost his U.S. security clearance. Like many other accused “Red sympathizers,” he spent the rest of his life defending his reputation. The Vassiliev documents concur with numerous other sources that show it was other scientists and technicians on the atomic bomb program who helped the Soviets develop a nuclear weapon.

One of the most compelling pieces of Vassiliev’s notes is a 1948 memo from Anatoly Gorsky, the chief Soviet spy handler in Washington until 1945. It lists the code names and true identities of members of a spy ring run by Elizabeth Bentley. A private citizen who was a member of the Communist Party of the United States, Bentley triggered one of the most public spy trials in history when she began naming names of all those who had helped her spy for the Soviets in the years before the war.

The Vassiliev notes show that the Bentley ring was one of the most successful that the Soviets ever orchestrated. “The single most disastrous event in the history of Soviet intelligence in America was Elizabeth Bentley’s decision to turn herself in to the FBI in 1945 and tell all she knew,” Vassiliev and his coauthors conclude in Spies.

Refuting allegations. Bentley ran a network of spies that included, she claimed, a former press officer for the State Department named Bernard Redmont. After Bentley’s confession, but before any trial, the FBI began tailing Redmont and his wife.

Based on Bentley’s confession, government agents read his mail, tapped his phone, and kept tabs on his job applications, according to declassified FBI reports. One of the jobs for which Redmont, a former marine, applied was as a correspondent with a new publication run by prominent conservative columnist David Lawrence. The G-men erroneously listed the magazine in their surveillance reports as U.S. Reports & World News.

In a trial stemming from the Bentley case, Redmont, then the Paris correspondent for U.S. News, denied being a Communist or a spy. He said that he and Bentley “discussed only material that was available and given to hundreds of other newspaper reporters and agencies and that could have been gotten by listening to the radio any day of the week.” But the fact that his name was all over the front pages was enough to shatter his reputation. Lawrence fired Redmont as soon as his testimony hit the papers.

Years later, he found work again in newspapers and then with CBS News, leading to a distinguished career that took him to Boston University, where he served as the dean of the journalism school. Now retired, he lives in Massachusetts.

But the KGB documents offer evidence that Redmont may have been a spy after all, one who operated under the Soviet code name “Mon,” according to Vassiliev and his coauthors. Haynes, a historian with the manuscript division of the Library of Congress, says the evidence against Redmont is strong. KGB memos from December 1945 and 1948 reported that Mon had been compromised when Bentley talked to the FBI. “He may have been a minor source, but documentary evidence is that he was a source,” the authors write.

But the case against Redmont is anything but closed and, unlike many others named in the book, he is able to refute the charges. What emerges from the Moscow archives and the Venona cables is a picture of two agencies, the FBI and Soviet intelligence, that were both under intense political pressure and inclined to exaggerate their own efficacy. The FBI was largely unable to thwart Soviet spies, was prone to abuses in its hunt for enemies, and often overstated its successes, says Athan Theoharis, a professor at Marquette University and an expert on FBI counterintelligence. Soviet spy handlers, meanwhile, were also under tremendous pressure to produce results and justify, among other things, their expense accounts. They’d sometimes listen to commercial radio news reports or read newspapers, summarize them, and send the results back to Moscow as if they’d gathered top-secret information through their spy networks.

There may be a strikingly benign explanation for the fact that Redmont’s name appears on a list in the Moscow archives, says Svetlana Chervonnaya, a scholar and documentary producer in Russia. She suggests that Redmont may have been considered by the KGB as a “journalistic asset,” someone used to obtain information and, more important, as an avenue for promoting the Soviet line in the media. The latter was of particular interest as early as the 1930s. “Most often, the journalists were not aware they dealt with intelligence operatives who were undercover as Soviet Embassy press officers or did not deal directly with the Soviets at all,” says Chervonnaya. That was the case with Walter Lippmann, the Spies authors conclude. I. F. Stone, meanwhile, actively assisted the KGB, and Ernest Hemingway, according to the files, was given a code name “Argo” but never provided any information.

No one has ever been able to point to any information (secret or otherwise) that Redmont passed to Soviet handlers, nor is there evidence he ever took KGB money. Years of FBI surveillance turned up nothing, and bureau agents repeatedly asked that the investigation into him and his wife be closed. No one ever alleged that he had in any way compromised national security.

Redmont said in an interview last year when the Vassiliev documents surfaced that he “never understood why anyone would name me as a spy. I am not now a spy, and I have never been a spy.” And he now says he’s dismayed to have the issue dredged up after so many years. “It was a very sad and poisoned period in American history where an allegation was equivalent to a conviction. I’d like to think we’ve moved beyond that, but maybe we haven’t,” he says.

Soviet paranoia. The parade of declassified materials raises a larger and perhaps more important question for historians of Cold War spying. Namely, was it worth it? In another new Yale University Press book, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History, journalist Susan Jacoby agrees that Hiss was most likely guilty. Yet that fact is insufficient to justify the McCarthyism and self-destructive Red-baiting that ensued, she writes. The same could be said of the Redmont kerfuffle.

If anything, scholars at a recent Smithsonian conference on Vassiliev’s notebooks suggested, KGB reports to Stalin probably reassured the paranoid Soviet leader of the true intent of U.S. foreign policy. Much as mutually assured destruction with nuclear arsenals perversely calmed Cold War nuclear tensions, mutual spying may have reassured policymakers that they truly understood the other side.

Nonetheless, the Soviet Union exhausted considerable efforts to identify and detain suspected agents provocateurs and built a police state on a foundation of denouncers and gulags. The United States, meanwhile, had its own show trials and televised denunciations before the House Un-American Activities Committee and shattered often innocent lives with allegations and innuendo. Even if new evidence suggests that all the smoke was not without fire, McCarthyism remains in the lexicon as the embodiment of politically motivated character assassination. While spy hunts did catch some of the guilty, it is unclear if it was worth the cost to the innocent when nations turned on themselves for crimes both real and imagined.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/2009/07/17/declassified-documents-reveal-kgb-spies-in-the-us.html

Those plans remained on the shelf, but for Allen, it was the first of many times that he would find himself at the center of historic national security crises. From the height of the Cold War and the Yom Kippur War to Iran-contra and the aftermath of 9/11, Allen has had an extraordinary 51-year career in intelligence. Now 74 and privy to perhaps a broader array of the CIA’s secrets than anybody else in history, the tireless Allen officially retired on Tuesday. For those on the inside, it’s hard to believe that the man famous for holding 6:30 a.m. meetings, working 80-hour weeks, and rarely taking vacations is leaving the spy world.

In his final weeks of government service, he’s been compiling a résumé for the first time. Unsurprisingly, there are some pretty large gaps, like the period from 1980 to November 1982, when he was the “program manager of a major classified project.” That was a top-secret effort to ensure the continuity of the U.S. government in an emergency, colleagues say, but he can’t talk about it. Intelligence, he says, “is not given a lot of credit in public, and many people talk about the intelligence community without really understanding it. There are many successes that I know about that are highly clandestine, but they will never be public. That’s the way it should be.”

The chapters of his career that he can talk about span from the secret CIA tunnel under East Berlin to using Twitter to monitor last year’s Mumbai terrorist attacks. His name first made the newspapers during the Iran-contra affair as the CIA analyst who blew the whistle on the Reagan administration’s illegal efforts to fund antileftist rebels in Nicaragua. Allen had been working on the Iran portion of the operation-the clandestine sale of missiles to Tehran in exchange for the release of American hostages-when he learned that something wasn’t right in the accounting. Allen was praised for blowing the whistle, but the CIA reprimanded him for not having disclosed more information sooner. He later fought successfully to have the sanction removed from his record.

Allen joined the CIA in 1958 fresh out of college. “I was about to graduate and realized I needed a job,” says Allen, who wears a gold class ring from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “I went to the university employment office, and someone said, ‘You should consider working for the Central Intelligence Agency.’ And I said, ‘That sounds like an interesting profession.’ ” The Cold War was in full swing. Less than a week into his job, Allen was poring over intelligence from the Berlin tunnel, a clandestine operation in which the CIA dug under East Berlin and tapped into Soviet communications cables. Neither he nor the CIA knew at the time that the Soviets were aware analysts like Allen were monitoring their every word.

These days, Allen is known throughout the intelligence community for his clarity of purpose as much as his epic work habits. His friends describe him as one of the most driven men they have ever met, neither particularly religious nor partisan but intensely patriotic and committed to “the mission.” After the 9/11 attacks, Allen stayed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., for days, sleeping on an inflatable mattress in his office. In the past three years, he took only two weeks of vacation to be with his wife, four children, and a clutch of grandchildren. The rest of that time, he worked from 5:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays, with a half-day on Saturday and six more hours on Sunday. So how does his family feel about that? “They do understand,” Allen insists.

Other than a three-year overseas liaison posting, Allen never really worked in the field. “I do wish that I had done more of that type of thing,” he says. By the early 1970s, he was the head of production in the CIA’s Office of Strategic Research. But even with access to the nation’s most prized secrets, it was hard to make all the right calls. In the fall of 1973, the Egyptian and Syrian armies were massing along their borders with Israel. On the night of October 5, Allen put the finishing touches on the CIA’s President’s Daily Brief for Richard Nixon the next morning. “I left the office at CIA and saw some reports that [Arab] forces were going on high alert,” he recalls. “I should have picked up the phone and called my superiors, and I didn’t.” Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack against Israel the next day. Nixon would later fault the CIA, saying the conflict “took us completely by surprise.” As Allen puts it, “I missed the [Yom Kippur] War, and that still sticks in my craw today.”

Nearly 20 years later, when Saddam Hussein deployed the Iraqi Army near Kuwait’s border, Allen wouldn’t made the same mistake again. He was the national intelligence officer for warning, akin to the CIA’s chief sentry. For several weeks that summer, he sent out a series of alerts about a pending invasion, culminating in an official “warning of war” message. But he was largely ignored. When Allen’s last warning reached the State Department, analysts there dismissed it as typical CIA exaggeration. A few hours later, Iraq invaded Kuwait. “People either dislike Charlie or they admire him, and for the same reason-he’s usually right,” says Richard Clarke, a longtime colleague and a former presidential counterterrorism adviser.

This incident was a prelude to one of the most difficult moments in Allen’s career. In 1991, six weeks into the air campaign against Iraq, he was working with Air Force planners to select targets. Allen and his CIA colleagues were suspicious of a building called Public Shelter No. 25, in the Amiriyah neighbor-hood of Baghdad. According to CIA maps, it was a secret operations center used by the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s intelligence service. At Allen’s urging, the Air Force dropped a pair of laser-guided bombs on the bunker.

Hundreds of civilians who had taken cover inside were killed. “It was a very difficult moment. We thought it was Mukhabarat, and there were some there,” Allen says, casting his eyes to the ceiling. “But we did kill innocent people, a lot of them,” he adds after a short pause. “I carry those lessons around every day, but I never lost heart or a sense of mission.”

By 1998, Allen was spending more and more time on terrorism issues. Then CIA Director George Tenet tasked him to coordinate the intelligence community’s efforts against Osama bin Laden, whose organization bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa that August. Allen and Clarke set up a meeting of the nation’s top al Qaeda experts and came to the conclusion that bin Laden’s most likely hiding place was an Afghan valley where U.S. spy satellites could not peek into the caves. The area was called Tora Bora, which later became famous when al Qaeda leaders took refuge there after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Two years later, frustrated by the lack of intelligence about bin Laden, Allen walked into Clarke’s White House office holding a picture of a small unmanned aircraft. “Ever heard of something called a Predator?” he asked. Allen said that getting the Predator deployed over Afghanistan was “a bloody struggle,” but in the fall of 2000, one of the drones captured hours of video footage of a tall, bearded man who analysts believe was bin Laden. For the next year, Allen fought to arm the Predator with missiles. “We need to hit him,” Allen told colleagues in the summer of 2001, “before he hits us.” Weeks after the 9/11 attacks, armed drones were finally deployed, and today they are one of the chief weapons against al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

By this time, Allen was coordinating collection efforts for the entire intelligence community. First for the director of central intelligence and later for the new director of national intelligence, his job was to determine how to deploy a network of spy satellites, eavesdropping sensors, and human spies to go after targets from terrorists to nuclear-armed dictators. He called it being “the night watch for central intelligence.” The post came with limited authority, but the man dubbed “Charging Charlie” by colleagues wielded his formidable reputation to get things done. “When Charlie Allen comes to you demanding answers, you got them,” says retired CIA veteran Robert Grenier. “He is unique in the agency because he commanded so much respect.”

Though Allen speaks excitedly about his final government job-running the nascent intelligence office at the Department of Homeland Security-others say it was a thankless assignment. “I never felt that I was just part of the bureaucracy,” he says. “You can’t assume all the world’s burdens, but if you have a sense of mission for keeping the country safe, one person can make a difference.” DHS was in chaos when Allen arrived in 2005. He brought along some CIA colleagues to help manage intelligence analysis and began coordinating the efforts of countless other agencies, from local police departments to the Coast Guard. Even though he never figured out how to stop getting pulled aside for additional screening at airport checkpoints, Allen says that DHS and the nation have become more sophisticated at dealing with the threat of terrorism since 9/11. Of course, the work remains unfinished. “We have learned,” he says, “to take nothing for granted.”

His departure from government means that he is losing his encrypted telephone, a device that has been in Allen’s Northern Virginia home for decades. “He is one of the few people I felt comfortable calling at home with a tough job at 10 p.m., because we all knew Charlie never really stopped working,” says John McLaughlin, a former acting CIA director.

Allen can’t list many hobbies, though years ago he enjoyed fishing. “I’ve still got a memory and a strong mind,” he says, an hour after the CIA physician gave him a clean bill of health. He plans to continue working, this time for himself. “I’m going to do some consulting work,” he says, “but no more 80-hour weeks.”

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2009/04/23/legendary-spy-charlie-allen-knows-the-cias-secrets.html