The Quantum Spy by David Ignatius

Author:David Ignatius
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

The Chinese man contacted Denise a month after her return to America. She almost thought that he had forgotten about his pledge, and she wondered if perhaps that was better. She had mentioned meeting him in the debriefing, when she returned from the conference. Of course, she had; people had seen them together in the bar, and she would face a polygraph eventually, so it was better not to conceal a foreign contact now. But the operations officer who debriefed her didn’t seem to care, especially when Denise said she thought the Chinese man didn’t have any potential as a “developmental.” She was so unimportant, even her contact with a Chinese official didn’t matter.

The first package of material arrived by Federal Express, just as the Chinese man had said it would. It was a long list of Russian computer scientists at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, with the names of several dozen highlighted in yellow. Denise Ford had seen this same list before. It had been generated by the machine-learning algorithm that she was using to examine Russian technical journals, as part of a joint project between her directorate and IARPA.

How had the Chinese man obtained this list? Ford could not imagine. But as she turned to the end of the package, she saw a note of explanation. The highlighted names were the ones involved in important, secret work. Over the next days, Ford subtly put this information to work. It was intuition, she told her colleagues, a feeling that she had from studying the product of the machine-learning search about who might be worth a deeper look.

Two weeks later, another package arrived. The documents in this second installment were more detailed. They listed the engineers at a computer science laboratory in Kazan that was engaged in advanced research on quantum computing. Ford put this to work, too. People were beginning to pay attention to her good guesses. And then there was a third package, focusing on a research pathway the Russians had chosen that hypothesized that there might be quantum bits with more than two dimensions. This, too, was gobbled up in the interagency hunt for information about rival approaches to quantum computing. The operations directorate got involved, too, when the analysts said the Russians were on a path to nowhere. The operators devised ingenious ways to make it appear that the Russian misadventure was actually a success, so that they dug deeper in the wrong direction.

This information helped Denise Ford’s career, just as the Chinese man had promised. And in the CIA’s hands, it harmed a Russia that he had seemed, genuinely, to despise.

It was a few months later that the first package arrived from the Chinese man in which he asked for Denise Ford’s reciprocal help, too, in creating the one world of scientific knowledge in which they both believed.

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