FBI Probes Espionage at Clinton White House - Insight Magazine
"If spies wanted to penetrate the White House, a facility widely considered the most secure in the world, how might it be done? For that matter, how might any agency or department of government be penetrated by spies?
“Actually, it’s pretty easy if you know what you’re doing,” says a retired U.S. intelligence expert who has helped (along with other government sources) to guide Insight through the many and often complicated pathways of government security and counterespionage.
Access to designs, databases, “blueprints,” memos, telephone numbers, lists of personnel and passwords all can be obtained. And from surprising sources. Several years ago this magazine was able to review from a remote site information on the supposedly secret and inaccessible White House Office Data Base, or WHODB (see “More Personal Secrets on File @ the White House,” July 15, 1996).
Despite the spending of additional millions to beef up security when the White House installed a modern $30 million computerized telephone system a few years ago, communications security remains a big problem. Whatever the level of sophistication employed, there are soft underbellies that raise significant national-security problems. And potential for espionage, such as electronic intercepting of phone calls, is very great.
Calls to or from the White House dealing with classified information are supposed to be handled on secure lines, but it doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, according to Insight’s sources, despite the existence of special phones at the White House and elsewhere to handle such calls, some don’t use them or only one side of the call does. An Insight editor recently was allowed for demonstration purposes to overhear a conversation placed over an unsecured line involving a “classified” topic.
Carelessness always has been a problem, but former and current FBI special agents say that under the Clinton administration the disregard for security has been epidemic. Many officials simply don’t like the bother of communicating on secure phones.
In another instance, Insight was provided access to virtually every telephone number within the White House, including those used by outside agencies with employees in the complex, and even the types of computers used and who uses them. Just by way of illustration, this information allowed direct access to communications instruments located in the Oval Office, the residence, bathrooms and grounds.
With such information, according to security and intelligence experts, a hacker or spy could target individual telephone lines and write software codes enabling the conversations to be forwarded in real-time for remote recording and transcribing. The White House complex contains approximately 5,800 voice, fax and modem lines.
“Having a phone number in and of itself will not necessarily gain you access for monitoring purposes,” Insight was told by a senior intelligence official with regular contact at the White House. “The systems are designed to electronically mask routes and generate secure connections.” That said, coupling a known phone number to routing sequences and trunk lines would pose a security risk, this official says.
Add to that detailed knowledge of computer codes used to move call traffic and your hacker or spy is in a very strong position. “That’s why we have so many redundancies and security devices on the systems — so we can tell if someone is trying to hack in,” says a current security official at the White House.
Shown a sampling of the hoard of data collected over just a few months of digging, the security official’s face went flush: “How the hell did you get that! This is what we are supposed to guard against. This is not supposed to be public.”
Indeed. Nor should the telephone numbers or locations of remote sites or trunk lines or other sundry telecommunications be accessible. What’s surprising is that most of this specialized information reviewed by Insight is unclassified in its separate pieces. When you put it together, the solved puzzle is considered a national-security secret. And for very good reason.
Consider the following: Insight not only was provided secure current phone numbers to the most sensitive lines in the world, but it discovered a remote telephone site in the Washington area which plugs into the White House telecommunications system.
Given national-security concerns, Insight has been asked not to divulge any telephone number, location of high-security equipment, or similar data not directly necessary for this news story.
Concerning the remote telecommunications site, Insight discovered not only its location and access telephone numbers but other information, including the existence of a secret “back door” to the computer system that had been left open for upward of two years without anyone knowing about the security lapse. This back door, common to large computer systems, is used for a variety of services, including those involving technicians, supervisors, contractors and security officers to run diagnostic checks, make repairs and review system operations.
“This is more than just a technical blunder,” says a well-placed source with detailed knowledge of White House security issues. “This is a very serious security failure with unimaginable consequences. Anyone could have accessed that [back door] and gotten into the entire White House phone system and obtained numbers and passwords that we never could track,” the source said, echoing yet another source familiar with the issue."