Clyde Simmer, his friend at the Justice Department, had told him that Drexler wasn’t a fool and Dillon confirmed this when he looked at the man’s academic record. And, as Clyde had also stated, Drexler worked quite hard; he spent fourteen hours his first day at Fort Meade. Bright and hardworking were good attributes in an employee. They were very bad attributes in an adversary. Drexler spent the first day going through the intercepts Dillon had given him and then focused in on one particular operation. The NSA, in conjunction with the FBI and Homeland Security, had been watching three young Palestinian students for over a month. The men were registered as students at George Mason University but spent very little time at the school they were supposedly attending. The reason why they were being watched was because they had made an abnormally high number of tours of the U.S. Capitol and had taken extensive notes and photographs while touring. Some of their e-mails, written in an extremely crude code, discussed security procedures they had observed.
