Clarke shrugged. Garcia realized that he was one of those people who titered out information in the smallest measurable units until he was offered something in return.
“I used to cover Fancy Bear,” Garcia said, by way of prodding.
“And now you cover movies.”
So it was going to be like that.
A waitress entered. Clarke ordered a Tito’s Gibson. Garcia did the same.
“Look, I got a tip and I’m following up. From somebody in the administration. Pretty high up,” Garcia said hopefully. “It’s about Russian infiltration of American utilities.”
“Oh. Tildy’s thing,” said Clarke. “She’s been hawking this story to any reporter who’ll listen.”
“Well, I guess I’m the one who listened,” Garcia said lamely.
“I like Tildy,” Clarke said. “She’s smart. A little obsessed, but you need that in her job. So, what do you want to know?”
“Start with how we concluded it was the Russians who attacked the Saudi plant.”
Clarke offered one of his flat smiles. “That’s actually not a dumb question,” he said, as if he were bestowing a compliment. “When it happened, I assumed it was Iran, like everybody else. They had already hit Aramco with a wiper attack, in retaliation for Stuxnet. Erased all their software. Thirty thousand workstations. The Saudis had to go around the world buying up hard drives. But nobody actually got hurt. With the new attack it looked like the Iranians were just upping their game, putting a little blood on the floor. That was before we tracked it to the Russians. We now know the code used in the Saudi attack was written by the venerable Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics, an old Soviet department.”
“What was their motivation?”
“It could have been a trial run. The Russians did a lot of that in Ukraine, like Sandworm, just trying things out until they got serious and took down the electrical grid. Same with Fancy Bear. Before they got into manipulating American politics they put out a lot of fake news to perfect their technique. And then they sprung the trap.”
“I still don’t see why the Russians would attack Saudi Arabia, even if they’re using a false flag, pretending to be Iran.”
“Think about it this way,” Clarke said. “How would Russian interests be served by a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran?”
“The price of oil would go through the roof. It would rescue the Russian economy.”
“Think deeper.”
“It would lead to war between Russia and the U.S.”
“I doubt it,” said Clarke. “Putin is a tightrope walker. He wants to draw the U.S. deeper into the Middle East without actually going to real war.”
“Wouldn’t the Iranians just take out the Arabian oil fields right away? Destroy the Saudi economy?”
“That’s not their preferred goal,” said Clarke. “Most of the Saudi oil is in the Eastern Province, which is largely Shiite. The Iranians want to annex that and take control of the Saudi resources. They’ve got lots of missiles and the coordinates for all the desalination and power plants in the kingdom. Without water and power, there won’t be much left of Saudi Arabia.”
Garcia took mental notes of everything Clarke was saying, but it was going by pretty quickly. “So how does this affect the U.S.?” he asked.
“We’d be dragged into another decades-long conflict. It would bleed the country dry. Meanwhile, Russia would pull the plug on our power grids, just like Tildy says.”
“So, we’d be without power for a while?”
“It would be a lot more serious than that. Do you remember the gas explosions north of Boston a couple years ago? Houses were blowing up. The fire departments were fighting eighty fires at once. All because some probably stoned technician accidentally over-pressurized the gas lines by a factor of three, forcing the gas to leak out. At the first spark, boom. So imagine the damage you could do if you controlled the valves and meters of utilities all over the country. The water plants, the nuclear facilities. Many of them are governed by those same Triconex systems, which were designed to keep the Saudi utilities safe. They’d be blowing up transformers and generators, knocking off power for months or even years. Russian subs sniff around the undersea cables. They could cut off the internet or compromise it to the point that it becomes unusable. Pretty much everything this country runs on could be brought to a halt.”