Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [92]
BIA advises that there are also certain indicators that a person is telling the truth. Because the truth is less useful to an interrogator in the early stages of an interview, BIA training tells clients to ignore the truthful behavior; but the firm does provide a handy list of the things that reveal when someone is telling the truth: direct answers, spontaneous answers, attentive and interested behavior, and consistency.
The truth, it seems, is easier to tell than a lie.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Eddie Murphy Strategy
Monday, March 5, 2007, dawned cool and clear in the Virginia countryside outside Washington. As Bobby Ferraro made his morning commute past the strip malls and open fields, he didn’t see anything in the sky that hinted of a problem, or of the multimillion-dollar riddle he’d need to solve in just a few hours.
Ferraro is the director of satellite operations for GeoEye, a company in Dulles, Virginia, that flies spy satellites for government and corporate customers. Begun with the merger of two smaller companies just over a year earlier, in January 2006, GeoEye was heading into its busiest season yet. It had just renegotiated a government intelligence contract to provide images taken by the company’s satellites.
That weekend, OrbView-3, one of GeoEye’s satellites in low orbit, had been photographing the Earth’s surface and beaming pictures to ground stations located around the world. From those points all over the globe, the images had been sent to GeoEye’s nondescript headquarters building in Virginia, where they were stored in a raw data form called “level zero” on a bank of high-speed computers. As Bobby Ferraro steered into the parking lot of his office complex, made his way to his fifth-floor office, and settled into his morning routine, the pictures awaited processing by GeoEye’s Monday-morning shift workers.
Ferraro left his regular 9 A.M. meeting and strode down the hall past the company’s flight operations center, a dark room crammed with the computers that control the satellites. Michael Schmidt, the company’s processing manager, walked up to him.
“We’ve got a problem with the images,” Schmidt said.
The pictures taken by OrbView-3 over the weekend had been fine for a while. But then the images taken on Sunday went black. One minute, this 670-pound satellite had been sending down photos from over the Caspian Sea, and the next, nothing.
“Oh, no,” murmured Ferraro. This could be bad.
At age forty-three, the normally cheerful Ferraro knew his way around satellites. He’d begun his career in the air force, and he had worked on research and development for the Strategic Defense Initiative, an effort in the 1980s to develop a missile system to protect the country from incoming Soviet ICBMs. Later, he’d worked at the command and control facility for the Global Positioning System (GPS).
Ferraro knew that any one of a number of problems could cause the images to turn out black. There could be a problem inside the GeoEye computers in Virginia, causing them to misread the data from the image files. There could be trouble with the transmission from the ground stations. There could be a glitch in the equipment that had initially received the pictures from the satellite.
Or, the problem could be with the satellite itself. This would mean that the multimillion-dollar machine was a total loss. There would be no way to get a repair crew to the satellite to fix even minor damage. The machine had been launched in 2003 and was supposed to last at least five years. Many satellites had lasted for a decade or more. It was far too soon for OrbView to conk out.
Ferraro walked down the hall to talk with the company’s head of spacecraft engineering.
“We may need