Top Secret America: Secrets centers transform many communities

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Top Secret America: Secrets centers transform many communities

FORT MEADE, Md. — The brick warehouse is not just a warehouse. Drive
through the gate and around back, and there, hidden away, is someone's
personal security detail: a fleet of black SUVs that have been armored
up to withstand explosions and gunfire.

Along the main street, the signs in the median aren't advertising
homes for sale; they're inviting employees with top-secret security
clearances to a job fair at Cafe Joe, which is anything but a typical
lunch spot.

The new gunmetal-colored office building is really a kind of hotel
where businesses can rent eavesdrop-proof rooms.

Even the manhole cover between two low-slung buildings is not just a
manhole cover. Surrounded by cement cylinders, it is an access point
for a government cable. “TS/SCI,” whispers an official, the
abbreviations for “top secret” and “sensitive compartmented
information” — and that means few people are allowed to know what
information the cable transmits.
All of these places exist just outside Washington in what amounts to
the capital of an alternative geography of the United States, one
defined by the concentration of top-secret government organizations
and the companies that do work for them. This Fort Meade cluster is
the largest of a dozen such clusters across the United States that are
the nerve centers of Top Secret America and its 854,000 workers.

Other locations include Dulles-Chantilly, Va.; Denver-Aurora, Colo.,
and Tampa, Fla. All of them are under-the-radar versions of
traditional military towns: economically dependent on the federal
budget and culturally defined by their unique work.

The difference, of course, is that the military is not a secret
culture. In the clusters of Top Secret America, a company lanyard
attached to a digital smart card is often the only clue to a job
location. Work is not discussed. Neither are deployments. Debate about
the role of intelligence in protecting the country occurs only when
something goes wrong and the government investigates, or when an
unauthorized disclosure of classified information turns into news.

The existence of these clusters is so little known that most people
don't realize when they're nearing the epicenter of Fort Meade's, even
when the GPS on their car dashboard suddenly begins giving incorrect
directions, trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the
government is jamming all nearby signals.

Once this happens, it means that ground zero — the National Security
Agency — is close by. But it's not easy to tell where. Trees, walls
and a sloping landscape obscure the NSA's presence from most vantage
points, and concrete barriers, fortified guard posts and warning signs
stop those without authorization from entering the grounds of the
largest intelligence agency in the United States.

Beyond all those obstacles loom huge buildings with row after row of
opaque, blast-resistant windows, and behind those are an estimated
30,000 people, many of them reading, listening to and analyzing an
endless flood of intercepted conversations 24 hours a day, seven days
a week.

From the road, it's impossible to tell how large the NSA has become,
even though its buildings occupy 6.3 million square feet — about the
size of the Pentagon — and are surrounded by 112 acres of parking
spaces. As massive as that might seem, documents indicate that the NSA
is only going to get bigger: 10,000 more workers over the next 15
years; $2 billion to pay for just the first phase of expansion; an
overall increase in size that will bring its building space

The NSA headquarters sits on the Fort Meade Army base, which hosts 80
government tenants in all, including several large intelligence
organizations.

Together, they inject $10 billion from paychecks and contracts into
the region's economy every year — a figure that helps explain the rest
of the Fort Meade cluster, which fans out about 10 miles in every
direction.

Just beyond the NSA perimeter, the companies that thrive off of the
agency and other nearby intelligence organizations begin. In some
parts of the cluster, they occupy entire neighborhoods. In others,
they make up mile-long business parks connected to the NSA campus by a
private roadway guarded by forbidding yellow “Warning” signs.
The largest of these is the National Business Park — 285 tucked-away
acres of wide, angular glass towers that go on for blocks. The
occupants of these buildings are contractors, and in their more
publicly known locations, they purposely understate their presence.
But in the National Business Park, a place where only other
contractors would have reason to go, their office signs are huge,
glowing at night in bright red, yellow and blue: Booz Allen Hamilton,
L-3 Communications, CSC, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, SAIC.

More than 250 companies — 13 percent of all the firms in Top Secret
America — have a presence in the Fort Meade cluster. Some have
multiple offices, such as Northrop Grumman, which has 19, and SAIC,
which has 11. In all, there are 681 locations in the Fort Meade
cluster where businesses conduct top-secret work.

Inside the locations are employees who must submit to strict,
intrusive rules. They take lie-detector tests routinely, sign
nondisclosure forms and file lengthy reports whenever they travel
overseas. They are coached on how to deal with nosy neighbors and
curious friends. Some are trained to assume false identities.

If they drink too much, borrow too much money or socialize with
citizens from certain countries, they can lose their security
clearances, and a clearance is the passport to a job for life at the
NSA and its sister intelligence organizations.
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Chances are they excel at math: To do what it does, the NSA relies on
the largest number of mathematicians in the world. It needs linguists
and technology experts, as well as cryptologists, known as “crippies.”
Many know themselves as ISTJ, which stands for “Introverted with
Sensing, Thinking and Judging,” a basket of personality traits
identified on the Myers-Briggs personality test and prevalent in the
Fort Meade cluster.

The old joke: “How can you tell the extrovert at NSA? He's the one
looking at someone else's shoes.”

“These are some of the most brilliant people in the world,” said Ken
Ulman, executive of Howard County, one of six counties in NSA's
geographic sphere of influence. “They demand good schools and a high
quality of life.”

The schools, indeed, are among the best, and some are adopting a
curriculum this fall that will teach students as young as 10 what kind
of lifestyle it takes to get a security clearance and what kind of
behavior will disqualify them.

Outside one school is the jarring sight of yellow school buses lined
up across from a building where personnel from the “Five Eye” allies —
the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand —
share top-secret information about the entire world.

The buses deliver children to neighborhoods that are among the
wealthiest in the country; affluence is another attribute of Top
Secret America. Six of the 10 richest counties in the United States,
according to Census Bureau data, are in these clusters.

Loudoun County, Va., ranked as the wealthiest county in the country,
helps supply the workforce of the nearby National Reconnaissance
Office headquarters, which manages spy satellites. Fairfax County,
Va., the second-wealthiest, is home to the NRO, the CIA and the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence. Arlington County, Va.,
ranked ninth, hosts the Pentagon and major intelligence agencies.
Montgomery County, Md., ranked 10th, is home to the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. And Howard County, Md., ranked third,
is home to 8,000 NSA employees.

Throughout the Fort Meade cluster are examples of how the hidden world
and the public one intersect. A Quiznos sandwich shop in the cluster
has the familiarity of any other restaurant in the national chain,
except for the line that begins forming at 11 a.m. Those waiting wear
the Oakley sunglasses favored by people who have worked in Afghanistan
or Iraq. Their shoes are boots, the color of desert sand. Forty
percent of NSA's workforce is active-duty military, and this Quiznos
is not far away from one of their work sites.

In another part of the cluster, Jerome Jones, one of its residents, is
talking about the building that has sprung up just beyond his back
yard. “It used to be all farmland, then they just started digging one
day,” he says. “I don't know what they do up there, but it doesn't
bother me. I don't worry about it.”


The building, sealed off behind fencing and Jersey barriers, is larger
than a football field. It has no identifying sign. It does have an
address, but Google Maps doesn't recognize it. Type it in, and another
address is displayed, every time. “6700,” it says.

No street name.

Just 6700.

Inside such a building might be Justin Walsh, who spends hours each
day on a ladder, peering into the false ceilings of the largest
companies in Top Secret America. Walsh is a Defense Department
industrial security specialist, and every cluster has a version of
him, whether it's Fort Meade; or the underground maze of buildings at
Crystal City in Arlington, near the Pentagon; or the Dayton, Ohio,
high-tech business parks around the National Aerospace Intelligence
Center.


When he's not on his ladder, Walsh is tinkering with a copy machine to
make sure it cannot reproduce the secrets stored in its memory. He's
testing the degausser, a giant magnet that erases data from classified
hard drives. He's dissecting the alarm system, its fiber-optic cable
and the encryption it uses to send signals to the control room.

The government regulates everything in Top Secret America: the gauge
of steel in a fence, the grade of paper bag to haul away classified
documents, the thickness of walls and the height of raised soundproof
floors.

In the Washington area, there are 4,000 corporate offices that handle
classified information, 25 percent more than last year, according to
Walsh's supervisor, and on any given day Walsh's team has 220
buildings in its inspection pipeline. All existing buildings have
things that need to be checked, and the new buildings have to be gone
over from top to bottom before the NSA will allow their occupants to
even connect to the agency via telephone.

Soon, there will be one more in the Fort Meade cluster: a new, four-
story building, going up near a quiet gated community of upscale
townhouses, that its builder boasts can withstand a car bomb. Dennis
Lane says his engineers have drilled more bolts into each steel beam
than is the norm to make the structure less likely to buckle were the
unthinkable to happen.


Lane, senior vice president of Ryan Commercial real estate, has become
something of a snoop himself when it comes to the NSA. At 55, he has
lived and worked in its shadow all his life and has schooled himself
on its growing presence in his community. He collects business
intelligence using his own network of informants, executives like
himself hoping to making a killing off of an organization many of his
neighbors don't know a thing about.

He notices when the NSA or a different secretive government
organization leases another building, hires more contractors and
expands its outreach to the local business community. He's been
following construction projects, job migrations, corporate moves. He
knows that local planners are estimating that 10,000 more jobs will
come with an expanded NSA and an additional 52,000 from other
intelligence units moving to the Fort Meade post.

Lane was up on all the gossip months before it was announced that the
next giant military command, U.S. Cyber Command, would be run by the
same four-star general who heads the NSA. “This whole cyber thing is
going to be big,” Lane says. “A cyber command could eat up all the
building inventory out there.”

At night, the cluster hums along. In the confines of the National
Business Park, office lights remain on here and there. The 140-room
Marriott Courtyard is sold out, as usual, with guests such as the man
checking in who says only that he's “with the military.”

And inside the NSA, the mathematicians, the linguists, the techies and
the crippies are flowing in and out. The ones leaving descend in
elevators to the first floor. Each is carrying a plastic bar-coded
box. Inside is a door key that rattles as they walk. To those who work
here, it's the sound of a shift change.

As employees just starting their shifts push the turnstiles forward,
those who are leaving push their identity badges into the mouth of the
key machine. A door opens. They drop their key box in, then go out
through the turnstiles. They drive out slowly through the barriers and
gates protecting the NSA, passing a steady stream of cars headed in.
It's almost midnight in the Fort Meade cluster, the capital of Top
Secret America, a sleepless place growing larger every day.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this story.