from the sitting area. Mary Pat took the easy chair across from the desk.
“How good is it?” Ed asked, knowing the reason for her visit.
“Calling this SORGE was unusually prescient for us. It’s at least that good.”
Since Richard Sorge dispatches from Tokyo to Moscow might have saved the Soviet Union in 1941, that got Ed Foley’s eyes to widen some. “Who looked at it?”
“Sears. He seems pretty smart, by the way. I’ve never really talked to him before.”
“Harry likes him,” Ed noted, referring to Harry Hall, the current Deputy Director (Intelligence), who was in Europe at the moment. “Okay, so he says it looks pretty good, eh?”
A serious nod. “Oh, yeah, Eddie.”
“Take it to see Jack?” They could not not take this to the President, could they?
“Tomorrow, maybe?”
“Works for me.” Just about any government employee can find space in his or her day for a drive to the White House. “Eddie, how far can this one spread?”
“Good question. Jack, of course. Maybe the Vice President. I like the guy,” the DCI said, “but usually the veep doesn’t get into stuff like this. SecState, SecDef, both are maybes. Ben Goodley, again a maybe. Mary, you know the problem with this.”
It was the oldest and most frequent problem with really valuable high-level intelligence information. If you spread it too far, you ran the risk of compromising the information—which also meant getting the source killed—and that killed the goose laying the golden eggs. On the other hand, if you didn’t make some use of the information, then you might as well not have the eggs anyway. Drawing the line was the most delicate operation in the field of intelligence, and you never knew where the right place was to draw it. You also had to worry about methods of spreading it around. If you sent it encrypted from one place to another, what if the bad guys had cracked your encryption system? NSA swore that its systems, especially TAPDANCE, could not be broken, but the Germans had thought ENIGMA crack-proof, too.
Almost as dangerous was giving the information, even by hand, to a senior government official. The bastards talked too much. They lived by talking. They lived by leaking. They lived by showing people how important they were, and importance in D.C. meant knowing what other people didn’t know. Information was the coin of the realm in this part of America. The good news here was that President Ryan understood about that. He’d been CIA, as high as Deputy Director, and so he knew about the value of security. The same was probably true of Vice President Jackson, former naval aviator. He’d probably seen lives lost because of bad intelligence. Scott Adler was a diplomat, and he probably knew as well. Tony Bretano, the well-regarded SecDef, worked closely with CIA, as all Secretaries of Defense had to do, and he could probably be trusted as well. Ben Goodley was the President’s National Security Advisor, and thus couldn’t easily be excluded. So, what did that total up to? Two in Beijing. At Langley, the DCI, DDCI, DDI, and DDO, plus Sears from inside the DI. That made seven. Then the President, Vice President, SecState, SecDef, and Ben Goodley. That made twelve. And twelve was plenty for the moment, especially in a town where the saying went, If two people know it, it’s not a secret. But the entire reason for having CIA was this sort of information.
“Pick a name for the source,” Foley instructed his wife.
“SONGBIRD will do for now.” It was a sentimental thing for MP, naming agents for birds. It dated back to CARDINAL.
“Fair enough. Let me see the translations you get, okay?”
“You bet, honey-bunny.” Mary Pat leaned over her husband’s desk to deliver a kiss, before heading back to her own office.
On arriving there, MP checked her computer for the SORGE file. She’d have to change that, MP realized. Even the name of this special-access compartment would be classified top secret or higher. Then she did a page count, making a note on a paper pad next to the screen.
ALL 1,349 PAGES OF RECIPES RECEIVED, she wrote as a reply to cgood@jadecastle.com. WILL LOOK THE RECIPES OVER. THANKS A BUNCH. MARY. She hit the RETURN key, and off the letter went, through the electronic maze called the Internet. One thousand, three hundred and forty-nine pages, the DDO thought. It would keep the analysts busy for quite a while. Inside the Old Headquarters Building, analysts would see bits and pieces of SORGE material,