Chapter 6
Although
Ensei Tankado was not alive during the Second World War, he carefully studied everything about it–particularly about its culminating event, the blast in which 100,000
of his countrymen where incinerated by an atomic bomb.
Hiroshima, 8:15 a.m. August 6, 1945–a vile act of destruction. A senseless
display of power by a country that had already won the war. Tankado had accepted all that. But what he could never accept was that the bomb had robbed him of ever knowing his mother. She had died giving birth to him–complications
brought on by the radiation poisoning she’d
suffered so many years earlier.
In 1945, before Ensei was born, his mother, like many of her friends, traveled to Hiroshima
to volunteer in the burn centers. It
was there that she became one of the hibakusha–the radiated people. Nineteen years later, at the age of thirty-six, as she lay in the delivery room bleeding internally, she knew she was finally going to die. What she did not know was that death would spare her the final horror–her only child was to be born deformed.
Ensei’s father never even saw his son. Bewildered by the loss of his wife and shamed by the arrival of what the nurses
told him was an imperfect child who probably
would not survive
the night, he disappeared from the hospital and never came back. Ensei Tankado was placed in a foster home.
Every night the young Tankado stared down at the twisted fingers
holding his daruma wish-doll and swore he’d have revenge–revenge against the country that had stolen his mother and shamed his father into abandoning him. What he didn’t know was that destiny was about to intervene.
In February of Ensei’s
twelfth year, a computer manufacturer in Tokyo called his foster family and asked if their crippled
child might take part in a test group for a new keyboard
they’d developed for handicapped children. His family agreed.
Although
Ensei Tankado had never seen a computer,
it seemed he instinctively knew how to use it. The computer opened worlds he had never imagined possible. Before long it became his entire life. As he got older, he gave classes,
earned money, and eventually earned a scholarship to Doshisha
University. Soon Ensei Tankado was known across Tokyo as fugusha kisai –the crippled genius.
Tankado
eventually read about Pearl Harbor and Japanese
war crimes. His hatred of America
slowly faded. He became a devout Buddhist.
He forgot his childhood
vow of revenge; forgiveness was
the only path to enlightenment.
By the time he was twenty, Ensei Tankado was somewhat
of an underground cult figure
among programmers. IBM offered him a work visa and a post in Texas. Tankado jumped at the chance. Three years later he had left IBM, was living in
New York, and was writing
software on his own.
He rode the new wave of public-key encryption. He wrote
algorithms and made
a fortune.
Like many
of the top authors of encryption
algorithms, Tankado was courted
by
the NSA. The irony was not lost on him–the opportunity to work in the heart of the government in a country he had once vowed to hate. He decided to go on the interview. Whatever doubts he had disappeared when he met Commander
Strathmore. They talked frankly about Tankado’s
background, the potential
hostility he might feel toward the U.S., his plans for the future.
Tankado took a polygraph test and underwent five weeks of rigorous
psychological profiles. He passed them all. His hatred had been replaced by
his devotion to Buddha. Four months later Ensei Tankado went to work in the Cryptography Department of the
National Security Agency.
Despite his large salary, Tankado went to work on an old Moped and ate a bag lunch alone at his desk instead of joining
the rest of the department for prime rib and vichyssoise in the commissary. The other cryptographers revered him. He was brilliant–as creative a programmer as any of them had ever seen. He was kind and honest, quiet, and of impeccable ethics. Moral integrity
was of paramount
importance to him. It was for this reason that his dismissal from the NSA and subsequent deportation had been such a shock.
* * *
Tankado,
like the rest of the Crypto staff, had been working
on the TRANSLTR project with the understanding that if successful, it would be used to decipher E-mail only in cases pre-approved by the Justice Department. The NSA’s use of TRANSLTR was to be regulated in much the same way the FBI needed a federal court order to install a wiretap. TRANSLTR was to include
programming that called for passwords
held in escrow by the Federal
Reserve and the Justice Department in order to decipher
a file. This would prevent the NSA from listening
indiscriminately to the
personal communications of law-abiding citizens around the globe.
However,
when the time came to enter that programming, the TRANSLTR
staff was told there had been a change
of plans. Because
of the time pressures often associated with the NSA’s anti-terrorist work, TRANSLTR was to be a free-standing decryption device whose day-to-day operation would be
regulated solely by the NSA.
Ensei Tankado was outraged.
This meant the NSA would, in effect, be able to open everyone’s mail and reseal it without their knowing.
It was like having a bug in every phone in the world. Strathmore attempted to make Tankado see TRANSLTR as a law-enforcement device, but it was no use; Tankado was adamant that it constituted a gross violation
of human rights. He quit on the spot and within hours violated the NSA’s code of secrecy by trying
to contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Tankado stood poised to shock the world with his story of a secret machine capable of exposing computer
users around the world to unthinkable government treachery. The NSA had had
no choice but to stop him.
Tankado’s
capture and deportation, widely publicized among on-line newsgroups, had been an unfortunate public shaming.
Against Strathmore’s wishes, the NSA damage-control specialists– nervous that Tankado
would try to convince people of TRANSLTR’s existence–generated rumors that destroyed his credibility. Ensei Tankado
was shunned by the global computer community– nobody
trusted a cripple
accused of spying, particularly when he was trying
to buy his freedom with absurd allegations
about a U.S. code-breaking machine.
The oddest thing of all was
that Tankado seemed to understand; it was all part of the intelligence game. He appeared to harbor no anger, only resolve. As security
escorted him away, Tankado spoke his final words
to Strathmore with a chilling
calm.
“We all have
a right to keep secrets,” he’d
said. “Someday I’ll see
to it we can.”
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