Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [203]
Tariq walked into the living room, where the Emir was reading, and picked up the television remote control. “Something you should see.” He turned on the TV and changed the channel to a cable news station. The pretty blond-haired, blue-eyed anchor was in mid-sentence.
“—again, a Pentagon spokesperson just confirmed an earlier BBC report of an Iranian Army exercise being conducted on its border with Iraq. While the Pentagon admitted the government in Tehran failed to announce the exercise, it went on to say such events are not uncommon, citing a similar movement of troops and equipment in early 2008. …”
Tariq muted the television.
“Strange bedfellows,” the Emir murmured.
“Pardon?”
While Tehran had been generally unsupportive of the URC’s cause, neither had it been a hindrance, knowing well that one never knew where interests might intersect. In this case, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security, or VEVAK, had in recent years turned its attention to how a postoccupation Iraq might look. Though well represented by several militias and bolstered by both Hezbollah and Pasdaran aid, the Iraqi Shia population was still a minority, and therefore vulnerable to Sunni persecution, an imbalance of power that Tehran despised and the URC was only too happy to exploit. Even as the United States had begun banging the drum for war in 2002, the Emir had conducted his own cost-benefit analysis and developed a strategy to further the URC’s aim. The fact that the strategy was obliquely based on the American economic model was something that would likely never occur to Washington.
The United States would eventually leave, or at least decrease its presence to a nominal level, at which time Iran would begin its play for domination in Iraq, a feat it couldn’t hope to accomplish without an advantage over the Sunni majority. In this, Iran had a need. It was a customer-in-the-making.
The URC’s involvement in Iraq had begun in August of 2003 with an influx of men, matériel, and expertise, all of which were freely offered to Sunni extremist groups. Based on a mutual hatred of the U.S. occupiers, resources were shared and goals intertwined, and by 2006 the URC held sway over great portions of Baghdad and most of the Sunni Triangle. This was the good or service for which Tehran was willing to pay.
As Mary Pat Foley and the NCTC well knew and Jack Ryan Jr. had recently realized, information availability in the digital age could be as much a hindrance to intelligence work as it could be a blessing. Computers can categorize, collate, and disseminate massive amounts of information, but the human mind can absorb and use only so much of it. The application of information is the pivot on which decisions—good, bad, and neutral—are made, a fact that engineers, game wardens, casinos, and hundreds of other seemingly unrelated disciplines had long ago recognized. Who does what, and where and when do they do it? To a city planner, a list of intersections prone to traffic gridlock was virtually useless; a dynamic map on which he or she could see hot spots and trends, invaluable. Sadly, as was too often the case, the U.S. government was playing catch-up in the fields of Data Visualization and information architecture, having to outsource such services to private cyber-savvy firms while the federal bureaucracy threw millions of dollars and lost time at the issue.
For Jack and Gavin Biery, the project they eventually dubbed PLOWSHARE began as a technical challenge: how to take the flood of open-source information on the Internet and beat it into something useful—a sword with which they could pare down the overload. The slightly overwrought metaphor notwithstanding, they made rapid progress, starting with a software program designed to gather obituaries from the eastern seaboard and map them according to various groupings: age, location, cause of death, vocation, etc. Many of the patterns that emerged were predictable—such as elderly deaths clustered around retirement homes