Approaching Zero, Paul Mungo [good summer reads TXT] 📗

Chapter 7 THE ILLUMINATI CONSPIRACY

Karl Koch was last seen alive on May 23, 1989. That morning he had turned up to

work as usual at the Hannover office of Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic

party. Just before twelve o’clock he drove off alone to deliver a package

across town, but he never arrived. In the late afternoon his employers notified

the police of his disappearance.

 

Nine days later the police went to a woods on the outskirts of the small

village of Ohof, just outside Hannover, on a routine enquiry. They were

investigating a report of an abandoned car, its roof, hood, and windscreen

thick with dust. In the undergrowth near the car, the police stumbled on a

charred corpse lying next to an empty gasoline can. The vegetation around the

body was scorched and burned. The police noticed that the corpse was barefoot—

but no shoes were found in the car or in the surrounding area.

 

The investigators were perplexed. There had been no rain for five weeks, and

the undergrowth was as dry as matchwood. But the scorched patch around the body

was contained, as if the fire that consumed the victim had been carefully

controlled.

 

The body was later identified as that of the twenty-four-yearold Karl Koch. The

police assumed he had committed suicide. But still there were questions:

principally, if Koch had killed himself, how had he been able to control the

fire? Why had it not spread outside the confined perimeter?

 

Then there were the shoes: Koch had obviously been wearing shoes when he left

his office. If he had taken them off, what had he done with them? It seemed as

if someone had taken them.

 

But there were no clues to a killer, and the death was deemed to be suicide.

 

Four years previously Karl Koch had been the first hacker in Germany recruited

by agents working for the KGB. At the time he was living in Hannover, a dropout

from society and school who had recently squandered the small inheritance he

had received following the death of his parents. A small-time drug habit helped

him through his bereavement, and beyond, but his life was going nowhere.

 

Apart from drugs, Koch’s only interest was hacking. His handle was Hagbard, an

alias taken from the Illuminati trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

 

According to the books, the Illuminati is a secret cult that has been in

existence since the beginning of time and has orchestrated every major crime,

misfortune and calamity. Only one man had ever emerged who could fight the

cult: the hero, Hagbard Celine. Koch was drawn by the conspiracy theories

nurtured in the books; he believed there were parallels in real life.

 

That year Koch met an older man named Peter Kahl. Kahl was then in his

mid-thirties, a small-time fixer who was looking for a big break. He worked

nights as a croupier in a Hannover casino and during the day was occupied with

putting together his latest scheme.

 

Kahl’s idea was simple: he planned to recruit a gang of hackers who could break

into West European and American computer systems, particularly those on

military or defense-industry sites. Then he would sell the data and information

they had gathered to the KGB.

 

Kahl first encountered Koch at a hacker’s meeting in Hannover. The young man

seemed an ideal recruit: malleable, drifting, amoral. Later, when Kahl

explained his scheme to Koch, the

hacker appeared receptive. Two weeks later Koch agreed to become a member of

the Soviet hacker gang.

 

In 1985 the computer underworld was a growing force in Germany. Hacking had

become prevalent at the beginning of the decade, as low-cost personal computers

became increasingly available. It had grown in popularity with the release of

War Games—the 1983 film in which Matthew Broderick nearly unleashes the next

world war by hacking into NORAD which proved peculiarly influential in Germany.

 

By the mid-1980s the Germans were second only to the Americans in the number of

hackers and their audacity. The national computer networks had all been

compromised; German hackers would later turn up on systems all over the world.

 

The growth of the computer underworld was nurtured by sustained media coverage

and the quasi-institutionalization of hacking. Nearly everything in Germany is

organized, even anarchy. So, in a parody of Teutonic orderliness, hackers

assembled into clubs: there was the BHP (the Bayrische Hackerpost) in Munich,

Foebud-Bi in Bielefeld, Suecrates-S in Stuttgart, and HICop-CE (the

Headquarters of the Independent Computer-Freaks) in Celle. Of course the most

famous and best-organized of all was the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg. Since

its inception in 1981, it had spawned affiliates in other towns and cities,

even a branch in France, and in 1984 hosted the first of its annual conferences, an event that served to keep the Chaos name in the press. In between the

annual congresses, Chaos also held smaller hacker meets at the various computer

conventions held around Germany. Whatever the event, the venue for the hacker

meet was always next to the stand occupied by the Bundespost, the German Post

Office, and the time was always four P.M. on the first Tuesday of the

exhibition.

 

Chaos was never a huge organization—even now it only has about 150 registered

members—but it is very accomplished at self-promotion and zealous in

disseminating information on hacking. It publishes a bimonthly magazine, Die

Datenschleuder (literally, “the Distribution of Data by Centrifuge”) with

sixteen to twenty pages an issue. It also promotes Die Hackerbibel (“The Hacker

Bible”), a two-part set of reference books detailing hacker techniques.

 

Chaos first came to the notice of the general public in 1984, Then it hacked

into the German computer information system, ,tx (Bildschirmtext).’ Like all

telephone and data services in Jermany, the system is run by the Bundespost, an

unloved, lureaucratic institution that is obsessive in its attempts to control

all national telecommunications links. The company added to its popularity with

hackers when it began licensing telephone anwering machines and regulating the

use of modems.

 

At first, Chaos was just another “information provider” on Btx. Subscribers to

the service could dial up and read pages of information supplied by Chaos on

their home computers. Users vere charged at a premium rate for the calls, with

proceeds shared between the Bundespost and Chaos. This seemed a good recipe or

making money—until one of the computer wizards at Chaos discovered that

security on the system was hopelessly weak. He

realized that if a hacker broke into Btx, he could get hold of the Chaos ID and

password (used by the club to access and update the information on its pages),

then dial up other services and ~ddle Chaos with the cost. With a minimum of 10

marks per call, bout $6.80, the amount involved could soon become astronomic.

 

Chaos’s founder, Wau Holland, and a younger member of the club, Steffen

Wernery, then aged twenty-two, decided to go public with the discovery. The two

contacted Hans Gliss, the managing editor of the computer security journal

Datenschutz-Berater (“Data Security Adviser”). Gliss invited Holland and

Steffen to attend an upcoming conference on data security and present their

information. But at the meeting Bundespost representatives disputed the club’s

claims, unwisely stating that its Btx security was impenetrable. It was the cue

for Chaos to demonstrate otherwise.

 

The Chaos team hacked into the Btx system and into the account of their local

savings bank, the Hamburger Sparkasse. They then introduced a computer program

they had written, causing the bank to call up the Chaos Btx pages repeatedly

over a ten-hour period. The program was simple: it merely called the Chaos Btx

number, waited for an answer and then hung up. Over and over again. After ten

hours, the bill for the bank came to almost $92,000. But although the bill was

never presented, the ensuing publicity carefully orchestrated by Chaos through

the German press agency—forced the Bundespost to improve its computer

security, and Holland and Steffen became national heroes.

 

The publicity increased Chaos’s notoriety; its first annual congress was

organized as a result of the coverage engendered by the Btx hack. Chaos became

a byword for high-tech mischief, and its congresses became an important

breeding ground for the German computer underworld. These congresses were

always held during the week after Christmas at the Eidelstedter Burgerhaus on

Hamburg’s Elbgaustrasse. The events lasted for three days, and press and

visitors were welcome, provided they paid the entrance fee.

 

In 1985 one of the paying visitors was Karl Koch. Steffen remembers seeing him

there and being introduced briefly. He is also certain that they also met on

one other occasion, at a hacker conference at an exhibition in Munich. Koch was

an unmistakable figure: tall, emaciated, and invariably spaced out.

 

For the next three years their lives would crisscross in a complex dance. If

Koch had seen the pattern, he would have understood. It was the Illuminati,

faceless, unknown, all-powerful, conspiring to take control of Steffen’s life.

 

Koch’s purpose in visiting the 1985 Chaos congress was to seek out certain

information on computer systems and networks. Despite his years of practice, he

himself was a second-rate hacker. He had come to realize that he was not a born

computer wizard; he needed assistance. He was coming under increasing pressure

from Kahl to find and copy classified material from computers in the West, and

his money was running out just as his dependency on drugs was increasing: from

the relatively harmless hashish favored by many hackers, he had graduated to

LSD and cocaine.

 

At first the Soviets had seemed incredibly naive: Koch was able to pass Kahl

public-domain software, programs he had simply downloaded for free from

electronic bulletin boards. The KGB had accepted the software, and Koch had

received payment. It seemed very simple, and he assumed he wasn’t doing

anything illegal: after all, public-domain software is freely available to

anyone who wants it.

 

But then the Soviets became more demanding. The KGB had produced lists of

programs it wanted to obtain and sites it wanted cracked. They also wanted

dial-ups, user IDs, passwords, and instructions on how to gain system-operator

privileges in computer systems. In short, the KGB wanted to