Free @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris Page A

machine was exported to Iraq for the surge, it was given a new name: the Real Time Regional Gateway, or RTRG. In the litany of NSA code words known for their absurd inscrutability—Pinwale, EgotisticalGiraffe, Nevershakeababy—the RTRG stood apart because its name actually described what it did.It produced intelligence reports and found connections among data in real time, that is, as soon as analysts queried the system; it was focused on a geographic region, in this case Iraq; and it
was
a gateway of sorts, a portal through which a user stepped into a virtual space in which all the connections were visible.
    General Keith Alexander was the driving force behind the RTRG. The system represented a culmination of his career-long efforts to bring high-level national intelligence directly to “the warfighter” (much like Stasio had envisioned when he first joined the army). The key to the RTRG’s success was its ability to fuse all that data coming in from raids, intercepted communications, interrogation reports, drone footage, and surveillance cameras into a single, searchable system. It was like a private Google for the new soldier-spies.
    The RTRG had a few fathers. The prototype was designed under a contract to SAIC, a longtime Defense Department contractor. Headquartered in California, the company had such deep and historic ties to the spy business that it was often called NSA-West. An army colonel named Robert Harms, who worked in the Military Intelligence Corps, managed the program at NSA. He would join SAIC after his retirement in 2009.
    Also among the developers was one of the most enigmatic spies of the late twentieth century, a retired air force colonel named Pedro “Pete” Rustan. His storied and secretive career gave some insight into how important the RTRG was to intelligence and military leaders such as Alexander and Petraeus, who believed it would be pivotal to the war in Iraq. After the 9/11 attacks Rustan, who had fled communist Cuba as a college student in 1967, left a lucrative career in private business and returned to government service at the National Reconnaissance Office, an agency more secretive than even the NSA, where he led projects to build spy satellites for the military and the CIA. Career intelligence officers who knew Rustan were tight-lipped about what precisely he did, but they described him as one of the true living legends in the spy business, and someone whose work had saved lives. In the 1980s, Rustan designed technology to protect air force jets that were hit by lightning. It worked flawlessly—the service never lost a jet to a lightning strike after it implemented Rustan’s design. In the early 1990s, Rustan managed a joint Defense Department and NASA program to build an experimental spacecraft, called
Clementine
, to explore the surface of the moon. It took only twenty-two months to conceive of the satellite and get it to the launch pad, a remarkable feat of engineering and project management that reinforced Rustan’s reputation for working brilliantly under tight deadlines.
    His work after the 9/11 attacks was closely linked to the new intelligence war. Rustan made frequent trips to the front lines and was known and liked among the clandestine warriors of the Joint Special Operations Command. After a Navy SEAL unit killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, they presented Rustan with a flag that flew at their base in Afghanistan. When Rustan died in 2012, Michael Hayden told the
Washington Post
, “This is the kind of guy the public never hears about but who is so responsible for keeping Americans safe.”
    In a 2010 interview with a trade publication, Rustan said no one agency in government had been looking for “patterns” in intelligence by putting together disparate pieces of data.The RTRG was designed to do that. He explained:
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Imagine that you are in Iraq. You have insurgents. They are on the telephone, making phone calls. That