SPIES IN CYBERSPACE

By DOUGLAS WALLER WASHINGTON

Within seconds, billion-dollar Pentagon spy satellites can deliver detailed photographs to ground stations. The National Security Agency's supercomputers can sort through intercepted phone calls with lightning speed. Even clandestine agents overseas can have instant access to CIA officials in the U.S. by using cellular phones. But until last year, the White House had to depend on the "pizza truck " for all this intelligence--even during a fast-breaking crisis. And the pizza truck--the agency's nickname for the delivery van bearing secret reports from the CIA's Langley, Virginia, headquarters--often became snarled in downtown Washington traffic.

Now, however, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have entered the cyberspace age--to the benefit of the White House and the demise of the pizza truck. Last December the CIA and the Pentagon began full operation of Intelink, a worldwide computer network that has borrowed much of its technology from Internet, the global network that links universities, research institutions, individuals and commercial computer services. An exclusive club, Intelink has 35 intelligence organizations feeding it and so far more than 3,000 users, all with secret or top-secret security clearances to tap into the system. More important, Intelink allows White House aides, State Department analysts, Pentagon generals, even soldiers in the field almost instant access to secrets on any subject they choose from a menu on their computer screens.

The results are a dramatic improvement over conditions just four years ago. During the Gulf War, for example, ground commanders lacked timely satellite photos to prepare for combat because the four computer systems handling the pictures couldn't talk to one another. Today Intelink users can punch up on their computers the most recent satellite photos, as well as thousands of pages of classified reports from various intelligence agencies. White House aides monitoring the Chechnya crisis were able to dial into Intelink for daily CIA updates on the civil war. Advisers confused about conflicting news reports on the fighting referred to another menu item: an animated video, based on satellite photos, that showed how Russian and Chechen soldiers were maneuvering against each other in the capital city of Grozny.

The available information is immense--and spectacularly manipulatable. The agency's computer system at Langley stores more than 4 trillion bytes of secret information--equal to a stack of documents 30 miles high. Its computer-disk farms, which take up two floors the area of two football fields, have numbers and letters painted on the walls, like a parking lot, so technicians don't get lost in the mainframes. It once took cia analysts months to identify members of a terrorist group who might be recruited as informants. Now using an "link-analysis" program, the informants can be spotted in seconds with mathematical formulas that gauge an individual's standing and access in the organization. A covert operative who must infiltrate a dangerous place like Baghdad can practice his or her mission using a computer program called Envision, which takes millions of satellite photos and converts them to a virtual-reality video of the city. Rotating a computer joystick, the operative can manipulate the video to wander through streets, peer into alleys or reconnoiter buildings at ground level.

Insular intelligence agencies once resisted sharing their secrets not only with bureaucratic rivals but also with their customers in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon. Now, says Intelink director Steve Schanzer, "agencies are competing with one another to get their products online" for fear of being ignored--and unappreciated--by the new viewing market.

There is more than a little trepidation about this open market in intelligence. For one, the Operations Directorate, which is the agency's clandestine arm that runs spies, has long been leery of computer networks-even the cia's. "They penetrate these kinds of systems, so why would they trust their own secrets on them?" asks a computer expert who works for the cia. Only in the past two years has the Directorate allowed its sensitive files to be put on the CIA's main computer system. After agency turncoat Aldrich Ames was uncovered, the Directorate took its E-mail address list off the main computer system, fearing that future moles could browse through it to identify case officers. (Fortunately for the cia, Ames told agency investigators after he was captured that the Russians never asked him to hack the system, mainly because his computer-illiterate handlers were clueless about how to do it.)

Federal authorities have warned that hackers can penetrate the Internet's sophisticated security barriers to steal information from companies and universities. But CIA officials believe their own computer system and the new Intelink are practically invulnerable to invasion by outsiders. There will always be the threat of government officials with security clearance who decide to betray their country and download intelligence files. Yet terminals inside Langley are routinely audited for suspicious activity, such as an unusual number of log-ins after hours or repeated failures to have a password accepted, usually symptomatic of a hacker testing out a host of computer-generated passwords. During their first polygraph, job applicants are now asked if they've ever tried hacking. The agency will also stage "red-team" exercises, during which computer experts try to hack the system from terminals in the building, probing for weaknesses.

Intelink operates over the Pentagon's Defense Systems Network, which has its own lines or leases special lines from phone companies to send encrypted messages. To penetrate that system, a hacker would first have to wiretap a dsnet line, then break the sophisticated encryption of its messages, as well as steal another user's password to get past the main menu.

Hackers regularly cruise the Internet looking for prey. But when they try to burrow into the CIA's secrets through its electronic link to that network, they face the ultimate barrier: the "air gap," says a senior intelligence official. For example, the CIA's "home-page" menu on the Internet offers viewers two unclassified publications: a Factbook on Intelligence and a World Factbook that gives statistics on foreign countries. But that electronic link is physically separated from the computer lines that carry the agency's secrets.

Cyber bandits keep probing nonetheless. TIME has learned that CIA security officers have caught at least half a dozen agency employees and contractors who on a lark have tried to hack parts of the agency's computer system that are closed off to them. A hacker from Canada almost daily tries to break past the CIA's Internet link to get to the agency's secret files. He once used the password "Clinton," thinking that would give him access to any secret. It didn't. "We know who he is," a CIA official said with a smile. "But there's no damage he can do because there's nothing on the other side of that Internet link" with the agency.

For their part, the CIA and other U.S. agencies are slowly discovering that the Internet can be a valuable source of intelligence. "Open-ness has come," says Robert Steele, a former intelligence officer who heads Open Source Solutions Inc. in Oakton, Virginia. He estimates that "40% of the total intelligence product that goes to the President comes from public sources," such as cnn, unclassified foreign- government documents and business reports. The Russian government, which once classified crop yields and factory output as state secrets, now routinely publishes those figures on the Internet to entice Western investors. Resistance groups in countries like Iran put information on international computer networks that agency case officers once had to obtain from underground newspapers inside the nation. Movements of nuclear weapons-related equipment can sometimes be tracked by monitoring the electronic bulletin boards of shipping companies. "The information is out there," says Henry Clements with Technology Strategic Planning in Stuart, Florida. "But you have to know what to look for and how to look for it."

Sometimes, though, all it takes is the right question. Thomas V. Sobczak, a security expert with Application Configured Computers in Baldwin, New York, says he recently decided on his own to pose a simple question on an electronic bulletin board for aerospace engineers: "How good is aircraft stealth technology?" A dozen engineers, scientists and even an Air Force officer responded with data on materials used in Stealth planes, their design and the ways radars may spot the aircraft. It was, Sobczak says, "more information that I ever thought I ever would need."