"The subject is closed." Phil's comment silenced the room. After all was said and done, Musgrave was the closet thing to the President in the room. As with the President, the discussion was over, the policy set, now let's get on with it. "So, Marv? What are we up against."
The seasoned professional in Marvin Jacobs took over, conflicting opinions in the past, and he handed out a series of TOP SECRET briefing folders.
"You've got to be kidding," laughed Martin Royce holding up his file. "This stuff will be in today's morning paper and you classify it?"
"There are guidelines for classification," Marvin insisted. "We follow them to the letter."
"And every letter gets classified." muttered Royce under his breath. The pragmatist in him saw the lunacy of the classifica- tion process, but the civil servant in him recognized the impos- sibility of changing it. Marv ignored the comment and opened his folder.
"Thanks, Phil," began Marv. "Well, I'll give it to him, Foster that is. If what he says is accurate, we have our work cut out for us, and in many cases all we can do is board up our windows before the hurricane hits."
"For purposes of this discussion, assume, as we will, that the Spook, Foster, is telling the truth. Do we have any reason to disbelieve him?"
"Other than attacking his own country? No, no reason at all." Marvin showed total disdain for Foster. His vehemence quieted the room, so he picked up where he left off.
"The first thing he did was establish a communications network, courtesy of AT&T. If Foster is right, then his boys have more doors and windows in and out of the phone company computers than AT&T knows exist. For all intents and purposes, they can do anything with the phone system that they want.
"They assign their own numbers, tap into digital transmissions, reprogram the main switches, create drop-dead billings, keep unlimited access lines and Operator Control. If we do locate a conversation, they're using a very sophisticated encryption scheme to disguise their communications. They're using the same bag of tricks we tried to classify over 20 years ago, and if anyone had listened . . ."