“This was an enormous, and enormously complex, program,” the former official said. “Before it was developed, the US had never assembled a combined cyber and kinetic attack plan on this scale.” For the United States’ cyber warriors, Nitro Zeus was a turning point. It exposed many of the tensions between the National Security Agency—which possessed most of the talent needed to pull off the attack—and the military’s newly created US Cyber Command. On paper, the two organizations were complementary. In reality, they had a constant series of spats, typical of arranged marriages, in which the NSA’s
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