What sticks in my mind more than any particular accomplishment of the supersecret National Security Agency is its mammoth size. Only a few miles from my home, I now know, exists a secret Orwellian town where tens of thousands of people live and work. It is surrounded by barbed-wire fences, massive boulders and thick cement barriers, all hidden by tall earthen berms and thick forests. Armed police patrol the boundaries of Crypto City, as this restricted area near the sleepy hamlet of Annapolis Junction, Maryland, is called. Telephoto surveillance cameras peer down. Heavily armed commandos dressed in black and wearing special headgear are on standby in case of trouble.
Beyond lies a forbidden city unlike any other on earth. Its main business is global eavesdropping; its mission is to obtain secrets about foreign enemies and friends alike, and to identify terrorist threats, drug trades, illegal arms sales and so on, all by intercepting voice, phone and radio communications. Using math, cryptology, statistical and other techniques, the NSA can break any code or cipher. The raw material is collected by its spyplanes, ships, satellites and through various other technical means, then is processed by the largest, most powerful electronic brain on earth.
More exact details of this forbidden city remain secret. County officials say they have no idea how many people work there, and no one will tell them. But James Bamford, in his Body of Secrets, offers some clues. The city’s post office distributes 70,000 pieces of mail a day; there are more than 37,000 cars registered there. The local police have more than 700 uniformed officers and their own SWAT team. The city’s consumption of electricity–to power six acres of computers, twenty-five tons of air-conditioning equipment and more than a half-million lightbulbs–costs nearly $2 million per month. In case of power outages, its own power-generating plant can quickly produce enough wattage for a community of more than 3,500 homes. It has its own fire department as well as twenty-three separate alarm systems and 402 miles of sprinklers, feeding 210,000 sprinkler heads. There are theaters, a bank, kindergartens, fitness centers, gas stations, clubs (even its own Gay, Lesbian or Bisexual Employees–“GLOBE”–club). Religious services are held in an unbuggable room, where priest and minister have security clearance far above Top Secret.
At the heart of this community is the NSA headquarters; with 3 million square feet of floor space, it could accommodate the entire US Capitol building four times over. The headquarters building almost metaphorically represents the NSA as well: From the outside, it looks like a stylish modern office building of dark one-way glass. But the real building is hidden under this reflective glass and is protected by a skin of orange-colored copper and unique windows–a thick outer pane, five inches of sound-deadening space, a thin copper screen and an inner pane. The protective shielding is designed to keep all sounds–and indeed any type of electromagnetic radiation–from getting out. It is used throughout much of the city to keep what is said to be the largest body of secrets ever compiled.
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Created at the height of the cold war, the NSA was to be the eyes and ears of the Central Intelligence Agency after the Communists drew an impenetrable “iron curtain” around their borders and effectively put human spies out of action. Its very existence has been so highly classified that few people outside the top echelons of government knew much about it. Until, that is, Bamford’s first book, The Puzzle Palace, was published in 1982.
Body of Secrets is more than an update of Bamford’s previous effort. It includes an engaging and informed history of signals intelligence during World War II, chronicling the breaking of Japan’s ciphers and Britain’s success in cracking Germany’s code. After the war’s end, the United States insisted on hosting the opening session of the United Nations in San Francisco to enable it to “eavesdrop on its guests,” Bamford says. “Like cheats in a poker game they [the Americans] were peeking at their opponents’ hands.” For a few years after 1945, the United States also read encrypted Soviet communications. But one Friday in 1948–it is still known as Black Friday among intelligence watchers–all Soviet ciphers went dark. Just as the Americans had successfully penetrated secret Soviet networks, so the Russians had penetrated the Army Security Agency. After that, Washington apparently knew little about Communist intentions. In 1950, when the North Koreans invaded the South, Washington was caught by surprise. Ditto on China’s entry into the war. With the Russians having just exploded a hydrogen bomb, the situation was getting more perilous. The loss of effective intelligence work prompted the Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, to tell the National Security Council that he was “gravely concerned” by “ineffective” intelligence operations. President Truman, on Election Day 1952, scrapped the Pentagon-run operation and created in its place a new agency to be largely hidden from Congress, the public and the world.
Bamford, an accomplished journalist, weaves a narrative about the NSA that includes sympathetic portraits of key players and detailed accounts of such highly publicized events as the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War and the capture of the spy ship Pueblo by North Korea. There are many heretofore undisclosed tidbits of information. President Eisenhower, for example, was personally micromanaging each U-2 high-altitude surveillance flight over Russia but refused to admit it after Francis Gary Powers was shot down in 1960. Further, Eisenhower instructed his Cabinet officers to lie about it while testifying under oath. The famous Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which officially plunged the United States into the Vietnam War, was passed by Congress on the strength of Robert McNamara’s “unequivocal proof” of a North Vietnamese attack on a US ship; that “unequivocal proof” turned out to be a “major blunder by NSA, and the ‘hard evidence’ on which many [in Congress] based their votes for the war never really existed.”
Beyond this there is Bamford’s somewhat speculative account of an Israeli assault on the US spy ship Liberty during the 1967 Middle East war. Bamford argues that it was a coldblooded action by Israel but offers no evidence of the culpability of the Israeli political leadership. The attack may well have been sanctioned by an Israeli military commander, but it is hard to imagine the top Israeli politicians signing off on such a risky venture, which carried enormous potential dangers for their state.
The NSA is only one component of the US intelligence community, and for a good deal of its existence it has been subservient to the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Its business was to collect raw information that was then analyzed by other agencies. The Director of Central Intelligence–head of the CIA–supervised the whole process. All along there has been, to be sure, a good deal of institutional and bureaucratic rivalry among the agencies, which is presented by Bamford in readable and dramatic fashion. Underlying these rivalries is a doctrinal issue: the conflict between old-fashioned, cloak-and-dagger human intelligence (humint) versus high-tech signals intelligence (sigint). The NSA, which spends the lion’s share of the $30 billion annual intelligence budget, reflects America’s predilection for gadgetry and high tech.
If there is a serious shortcoming in this massive book, it is the failure to provide a critical assessment of the mission for which the NSA was founded: to provide Washington with accurate information on the political, military and economic state of the Soviet Union. For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the NSA had one singular objective: “to break the stubborn Russian cipher system and eavesdrop on that nation’s most secret communications,” Bamford writes. But there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the NSA ever cracked a single high-level Russian cipher system. That being the case, what are the nation’s most precious secrets that Bamford keeps mentioning are held in a fantastic system capable of storing 5 trillion pages of text–a stack of papers 150 miles high–allowing for almost instant retrieval of any piece of information? What is there to be retrieved?
Not much, I suspect. From personal experience I know that whenever the NSA did successfully accomplish something–it managed to decrypt Russian voice communications in the early 1970s and for a long time eavesdropped on the phone conversations of Soviet leaders talking in their limousines–word of its success filtered out. Washington, apart from its almost bottomless appetite for “intelligence,” is also a town where anything worth knowing is quickly disclosed by gossiping officials eager to show that they are in the loop. One such official told me in early 1973 about a car accident involving Soviet Premier, Alexei Kosygin. He knew exactly when it happened and where, but nothing more. As a young reporter, I rushed breathlessly to my office, already envisioning it on the front page of the Post the next morning. I had no idea how this information had been obtained; now I know that we would have blown an important intelligence operation had we published the story. But executive editor Ben Bradlee knew it was sensitive enough to require consultations with the Post‘s legal counsel Joseph Califano and Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms. After protracted haggling the story was scrapped, but not because of Helms’s talk about dire consequences: Only if Kosygin was hurt and a leadership change was imminent, Bradlee said, would he run the story.
In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, US intelligence stood accused of having failed in its primary mission. Since few people knew much about the NSA, blame naturally fell on the CIA; critics said it had overestimated the Soviet military threat and not foreseen the economic and political demise of our prime adversary. Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence from 1977 to 1981, talked about the “enormity of failure” in a 1991 article in Foreign Affairs, in which he alleged that “I have never heard a suggestion from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of defense or state, that numerous Soviets recognized a growing systemic economic problem.” William Odom, NSA director from 1985 to 1988, argued in 1994 that the CIA was superfluous and should be disbanded. “The only serious issue here is whether you want to continue to pay all these people…. I consider…their analytical effort a welfare transfer package,” he stated at the Harvard Intelligence and Policy Project, conducted by professors Ernest May and Philip Zelikow.
How did US policy-makers get into such a state of ignorance? Solid though the product of an intelligence service may be, it is only as good as the uses to which it is put. Governments–all governments–gather, conceal, suppress and manipulate “intelligence.” American leaders have frequently done so to serve their political objectives. Richard Nixon, under the rubric of “national security,” tried to use the intelligence community to hide his involvement in the Watergate scandal; he also used the NSA to secretly target antiwar protesters. In the late 1970s Congress outlawed wholesale, warrantless acquisition of raw telegrams and arbitrary watch lists containing the names of Americans, but the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act did not cover Americans living abroad.
The product, by the late 1970s, was no longer solid. Internal bureaucratic struggles consumed the community. Once an unwanted stepchild of the CIA–the NSA director was initially denied a seat on the Intelligence Advisory Committee–the NSA had in fact grown large and powerful. Its original mandate was to collect intelligence, not analyze it, but by the late 1970s the NSA began hoarding its information. The material it distributed was sanitized, according to then-Director of Central Intelligence Turner, who charged it with “deliberate withholding of raw information from the true analytic agencies. NSA wants to get credit for the scoop.”
Under Ronald Reagan, arguably the most zealous cold war President, the intelligence community regained its footing to become once again the chief tool of US foreign policy. Its anti-Soviet activism led to the criminal excesses of the Iran/contra scandal. The chief strategist of malfeasance was William Casey, the first Director of Central Intelligence to be a member of the Cabinet as well. Casey chose as his deputy Robert Gates, a hard-line anti-Soviet analyst. Odom was their soulmate, “an arch-conservative military hard-liner” who wanted the NSA to assume a greater analytical role.
Throughout the 1980s the intelligence community provided Congress and the public with exaggerated accounts of Soviet military and economic prowess. The slick annual Pentagon review called “Soviet Military Power” showed the Russians developing and deploying ever-more dangerous weaponry. America was facing a “window of vulnerability”–a time when the Soviet Union, an indestructible colossus, could start a nuclear war. Paul Nitze and his Committee on the Present Danger speculated that the Russians could win such a war, owing to their extensive civil defense network and capacity to absorb a US retaliatory strike but deliver the final nuclear blow. As late as October 1988, top CIA analyst Robert Gates warned that “the dictatorship of the Communist Party remains untouched and untouchable. A long competitive struggle with the Soviet Union lies before us.” When the Senate intelligence panel asked Gates earlier what the intelligence community was doing to prepare American policy-makers for the consequences of Gorbachev’s reforms, Gates replied: “Quite frankly, without any hint that such fundamental change is going on, my resources do not permit me the luxury of sort of just idly speculating on what a different Soviet Union might look like.”
Yet we all know that in 1989 the Soviet empire was dismantled; in 1991 the Soviet Union itself collapsed, and American leaders were clueless. What went wrong?
Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz, who says in his memoirs that he was “misled, lied to” by the CIA, reveals that Casey had effectively usurped the prerogatives of the Secretary of State and had run an alternative foreign policy. Casey could do so because he controlled the analytical process, the estimates, covert action and counterintelligence. Casey’s views, Shultz writes, “were so strong and so ideological that they inevitably colored his selection and assessments of materials. I could not rely on what he said, nor could I accept without question the objectivity of ‘intelligence’ that he put out, especially in policy sensitive areas.”
Gorbachev was initially described as “just talk, just another Soviet attempt to deceive us,” Shultz says. “When it became evident that the Soviet Union was, in fact, changing, the CIA line was that the changes wouldn’t really make a difference.”
Casey and Gates systematically ignored their own specialists and overstated the “evidence” of Soviet arms procurement programs, and the state of the Soviet economy in general, to buttress their argument. Douglas MacEachin, director of the CIA’s Office of Soviet Analysis from 1984 to 1989, has testified that the pattern of self-deception was promoted by an Administration eager to rebuild US military power. The intelligence community aided the effort by inflating projections of Soviet military strength.
“Never mind that the Soviet Union never in ten years, from the late 1970s through the entire 1980s, ever lived up to the projections that were made,” MacEachin said. “We projected these huge forces, then used those projections as a rationale for our [military] spending, and they never lived up to those projections.” Richard Kerr, deputy director for intelligence, took a memo to that effect from MacEachin before the National Foreign Intelligence Board–but it wasn’t mentioned, even as a footnote, in the final documents.
The problem here was not one of honest people with strong views having honest disagreements. Rather, it was a blatant politicization of intelligence. Hawks were in charge; those who disagreed were singled out for being “soft” on communism. Robert Blackwell, a high-level CIA official, talked of palpable tension at Langley. “Whether anything was being twisted or reordered upstairs or not, people felt that they were under extra burdens to somehow be very careful about how things were said.” MacEachin said the Reagan Administration “thought of us as the enemy.” The implication was, he added, “that part of the national threat was that the CIA undercut our ability to rebuild our national forces.”
MacEachin’s successor, George Kolt, had set up in September 1989 a supersecret contingency planning group “looking at the possibility of the collapse of the Soviet Union and what we do.” This was rejected by the higher-ups, however. Robert Gates’s views on Russia had not changed. A month before the collapse of the Berlin wall, Vice President Dan Quayle publicly referred to Gorbachev as a “master of public relations” and called perestroika a “form of Leninism.”
Gates was consistent to the end. When on August 19, 1991, Kremlin hard-liners mounted a coup attempt against Gorbachev, Kolt called President Bush’s National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, saying the coup might not succeed and implicitly suggesting that the White House condemn the coup leaders. Gates saw no reason to hope the coup would fail, and President Bush’s initial pronouncements were noncommittal. As Gates explained later, “Based on all prior experience in Russian and Soviet history, when you know at the outset that you’ve got the KGB and the army and the party all together in a coup attempt, the chances of it not succeeding…are near zero.”
Something is obviously wrong with what Bamford calls the largest, best-funded, and “most advanced spy organization on the planet.” The entire intelligence community has grown lazy and fat over the years. In the case of the NSA, there is a cozy relationship between it and parts of private industry: Former top NSA officials often end up working for TRW, Honeywell, E-Systems or Booz-Allen & Hamilton. Eavesdropping equipment alone is a $2 billion-a-year market.
Is our money being spent wisely? A former intelligence analyst, Robert Steel, who now runs a private intelligence firm called Open Source Solutions, recently demonstrated to the Presidential Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board that he could produce more usable information more quickly by using open sources and the Internet than the intelligence community could get from its secret work (his demonstration included satellite photography and military orders of battle).
I’m not suggesting outsourcing here. But what is the point of having a powerful spy agency in the sky–eavesdropping on friend and foe alike–when we are caught by surprise by India’s nuclear tests in 1998? Or when, as during the Gulf War, we are unable to locate Saddam Hussein’s Scuds?
Not so long ago, the United States declared war on terrorism. Yet there are only two references to Osama bin Laden in this book (one of them being that the NSA, “to impress cleared visitors,” occasionally plays audiotapes of bin Laden talking to his mom), and other well-known groups suspected of international terrorism are not even mentioned. Perhaps there is a great deal of information about them in 50-100 million documents that the NSA classifies each year–more than all other agencies of the US government combined. But I wonder who reads these documents and evaluates their content. As someone who is bilingual, I seriously question the quality of work of the NSA computers said to translate up to 750 pages of Russian text per hour. NSA language training itself sounds pretty skimpy: Chinese and Japanese take “two years,” Bamford reports, but this reads as more than presumptuous to anyone even remotely familiar with Chinese (a literate Chinese uses between 20,000 and 40,000 individual characters, which take many years to learn). Michael Hayden, the current NSA director, does assure us that “There is a whole other addition there [in training] to turn someone who has working knowledge of the popular language into a cryptolingist.” Good Lord! Is Hayden kidding us or does he believe this? I hope it is the former.
“That NSA has the technical capability to intercept and store enough information to wallpaper much of the planet is unquestionable,” Bamford writes. “What is in doubt, however, is the agency’s ability to make sense of most of it.”
In the acknowledgments to Body of Secrets, Hayden is the first person on the author’s list of thank-yous. Which is an important clue. The NSA is an agency in search of a new mission. Some of its work remains invaluable, especially tactical intelligence needed by the Pentagon. But sigint now has far less strategic value. Moreover, digital communications, fiber-optic cables and powerful encryption software make it nearly impossible for the NSA to dominate the ether the way it did a decade ago. There is also a growing realization in Congress that something is wrong. In 1998 the House Intelligence Committee threatened to withhold funding unless the agency made “very large changes” in its “culture and methods of operation.” For several years auditors found that the NSA had ignored laws and regulations, that its financial statements were not in order and that it had mismanaged its expensive high-tech systems. Hayden’s attempt at candor may be a way to rally support.
Judging by the book’s last chapter, NSA leaders hope that new scientific breakthroughs–fabricating computing devices out of biological entities, using biological processes to manufacture nonbiological devices–will solve their problems. The computer of the future, we are told, is going to be constructed from both mechanical and living parts. It will be 100 billion times faster than the fastest PC today. What that means when it comes to problems of terrorism, international organized crime, arms proliferation, narcotics trafficking, illicit trade and such issues is a mystery.
Just think, though, how impressive it will be!
