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To my wife and soul mate, Chris
… and to Charles Gandy’s wife and soul mate, Freda
Foreword
When I assumed command of NSA in March 1999, I quickly realized that, although the intelligence agency was a national treasure, it needed to be shaken up to meet the daunting challenges of the new millennium.
9/11 made the need to reenergize NSA even more acute, so I reached outside of the government for top industry talent to help me accelerate the agency’s transformation.
Eric Haseltine, who came from Walt Disney Imagineering, of all places, was perhaps my riskiest and most audacious hire. I brought Eric into the agency to lead and to shake up NSA’s Research Directorate, whose mission, in turn, was to shake up and modernize the entire enterprise.
Although parachuting a Disney executive with no intelligence experience into a leadership post at NSA raised a lot of eyebrows and generated hallway snickers about “General Hayden’s Mickey Mouse hire,” Eric immediately met—and surpassed—my expectations for helping to transform the agency.
Perhaps his most important accomplishment was to quickly shift NSA’s research focus from “cool science projects” to technologies that made an immediate, substantial, and practical improvement to NSA’s core signals intelligence and information assurance missions.
The transformation of NSA research that Eric began in mid-2002 proved very timely when the Iraq war erupted early the following year. Rather than sit at his desk in our Fort Meade headquarters, Eric traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan multiple times to get a firsthand look at the needs of NSA officers directly supporting combat operations in the two theaters of war. These trips were the first time in NSA’s history a director of research had traveled to “the pointy end of the spear” in order to establish research priorities.
Each time Eric returned from one of these trips, I valued his candid take on the effectiveness of NSA’s combat support activities. I especially appreciated it when Eric spoke truth to power, as when, in early 2004, he informed me that a good number of NSA’s military “customers” were less than thrilled with the timeliness and effectiveness of NSA support. Based on Eric’s input, I ordered immediate changes to the way NSA supported war fighters, shipping several hundred cryptologic support elements to the battlefield and integrating them with war fighters to improve NSA’s responsiveness.
Getting into the spirit of combat support, Eric also directly engaged NSA research in important challenges, such as reducing casualties from roadside IEDs. For his contributions in this vital area, Eric was awarded the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal.
In 2005, when President George W. Bush appointed me the first principal deputy director of national intelligence, I brought Eric with me as associate director of national intelligence to lead science and technology for the entire U.S. intelligence community (IC). My hope was that Eric would do for the entire U.S. intelligence enterprise—comprised of no fewer than sixteen different intelligence agencies—what he had done at NSA: shake things up.
And shake things up he did. Eric moved swiftly to weave the disparate threads of science and technology efforts across the IC into a coherent whole, even when the threads strenuously resisted being woven. Both I, and the IC’s overall boss—John Negroponte, director of national intelligence—fielded multiple calls from agencies across the community complaining of Eric’s aggressive moves to unify and rationalize science and technology pursuits across America’s far-flung intelligence enterprise.
Perhaps Eric’s most controversial, and important, move was to work with his deputy and successor, Steve Nixon, to create the IC’s own version of DARPA, IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity). IARPA filled a glaring and dangerous hole in the IC’s science and technology portfolio: high-risk, high-reward endeavors that brought about revolutionary, as opposed to evolutionary, advances in mission capability.
Creating IARPA was a gutsy move, because in order to fund it, Eric and Steve had to take large sums of money away from individual agencies, most notably the CIA (where I was then director!).
We naturally butted heads a few times, but we never stopped engaging constructively or respecting each other, and when Eric left the government in 2007, we were still good friends and now enjoy serving on a corporate board together.
Reading through a draft of this book, I realize that Eric has not stopped shaking things up. His candid but accurate description of the way our intelligence agencies sometimes underestimate the Russians—badly—will not sit well in many quarters, nor will his descriptions of interagency turf fights that give the Russians an added edge against us.
The actors have changed in the forty years since the events described here, but many of the key issues and challenges have not. The Russians continue to surprise us with their audacious, innovative tradecraft, and we sometimes disappoint, even responding to Russian moves with denials and finger-pointing rather than purposeful action. Russian efforts to change the outcome of our 2016 presidential election come to mind.
So although this book describes a devastating Russian attack on our national security at the height of the Cold War, its lesson is extremely timely and important for today, and that lesson is this: we can never afford to underestimate the inventiveness and determination of highly motivated adversaries, nor can we underestimate the damage we do to ourselves when we fight each other responding to such adversaries.
To modify a phrase coined by The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, “Russia cannot destroy America. Only we can do that.”
—General Michael V. Hayden USAF (retired), former director of NSA and former director of CIA, and author of The Assault on Intelligence and the New York Times bestseller Playing to the Edge
Preface
NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland, February 2003
The gleaming glass-fronted structure that serves as NSA’s main headquarters building doesn’t look much like a government facility on the outside. With its clean lines and tinted sides that reflect the eastern Maryland sky, OPS2, as the building is called (OPS standing for “operations”), would be more at home in the financial district of any large American city than on the campus of a large army base.
The inside of OPS2 is another matter. Where a commercial building would have carpeted floors, potted plants, and stylish prints adorning the walls, the raised floors of NSA headquarters are simple computer-floor tiles, which allow power and data cables to pass unmolested underneath. The walls are almost entirely devoid of decoration, save an occasional security reminder every few hundred feet or so. The overhead fluorescent lighting is bright and harsh.
In a commercial building, coworkers would be gathered in hallways, drinking coffee and engaging in informal shoptalk or gossip, but in OPS2, as in other NSA buildings, employees seldom congregate for hallway chitchat.
In fact, employees at the Fort don’t talk much even
inside their cipher lock–protected office spaces. NSA, whose job is to collect and analyze electronic information from around the globe, is a place for listening, not talking.
Coming from the gregarious entertainment business in Hollywood, and being overly talkative, I never got used to the muted, introverted culture of NSA during my three years there, and it certainly never got used to me.
Seldom was this clash of styles more evident than at my first meeting with the outside board of experts who advised my new boss, NSA director Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, on the performance of the NSA’s Research Directorate, which I had taken over as chief in August 2002.
The NSA advisory board was—with a few exceptions—comprised of sober, thoughtful former senior executives at NSA, the Pentagon, or CIA along with top executives at technology companies. These were serious men on a serious mission: to make sure that I didn’t screw up what they considered to be a national treasure, NSA’s research-and-development group, whose mission was to invent the future of stealing and protecting electronic secrets.
The influential members of NSA’s advisory board (NSAAB), which included a former DARPA director and assistant secretary of defense, had a hand in the premature and abrupt removal of my immediate predecessor, so I was eager to impress them during my first NSAAB engagement, whose purpose was to review the Research Directorate’s progress over the first six months of my tenure.
At the conclusion of the grueling day-and-a-half meeting, I was exhausted and hoarse from talking almost nonstop about the directorate’s new direction—and more than a little worried. While a few of the board members were engaged and offered critiques and helpful comments, most simply listened and jotted down notes, giving scant indication of their reactions to my presentation or those of my research team members.
The meeting had been civil, with a constructive atmosphere, but at its conclusion, I hadn’t the slightest clue what they were going to tell General Hayden about the Research Directorate and my performance. An hour before the meeting ended, I was asked to leave so that the board could deliberate in private and prepare their conclusions for the director.
Instead of slogging through the fresh snow to my office in the research and engineering building a quarter mile away, I chose to wait in a small NSAAB conference room for the board to adjourn so that I could say goodbye to the board members as they left and to try to get a sense of how the meeting had gone. I would get the board’s conclusions in writing a few days later, but was hoping to get an early read from comments and body language of different board members as they departed.
I was disappointed. Most members simply shook my hand and left immediately, while those that lingered talked among themselves. None offered encouragement or seemed eager to talk with me.
The exception was a slender, white-haired man, a couple of inches taller than I was, who had interviewed me a year earlier when I had applied for the job. In a slow, Deep Southern drawl, the man asked, “Can I grab you for a moment?”
“Sure,” I answered, apprehension growing. The man, a retired NSA executive, had sat quietly, listening and making eye contact during the meeting, but had only offered an occasional comment. He had provided few clues about his thoughts during the meeting, except to briefly mention a particular area of NSA technical tradecraft that he thought deserved greater focus.
“Charles Gandy, isn’t it?” I asked, dredging up his name from my encounter with him twelve months earlier.
“Yes. Gandy. We actually met at Disney about five years ago.”
Oh, crap, I thought. I had forgotten that. When my boss at Disney, Bran Ferren, the president of research and development, had brought him in to consult, Gandy had hardly said a word, and my only impression of him was that he was what we techno-geeks called a diode, meaning that, like a semiconductor diode, information travels in only one direction. In Gandy’s case, that direction had been outside–in. I didn’t recall a single thing he had said at Disney, if indeed he had said anything at all. A conversation with a Disney coworker who’d sat in the meeting with Gandy came back to me. The colleague had pointed to Charles’s back as he left our building and whispered, “Roach motel” (meaning, like roaches in the famous TV commercial, information checked in but didn’t check out).
No wonder I had completely forgotten meeting Gandy.
Gandy and I found an empty conference room nearby and made ourselves comfortable in the stuffed chairs. Anxious, and never long on tact, I got right to the point. “What did you think about the ideas I gave the board for changing NSA’s research priorities?”
“Well,” he said slowly, “I was pleasantly surprised by most of it.” He paused, evidently choosing his words with care. “Honestly, I didn’t think you were up to the job, and I recommended against your being hired. But your presentation today showed that in this short period of time, you have really grasped what’s going on and what’s needed.”
I swallowed hard, realizing my nervousness about the meeting had been on target. Despite his comment about there being some hope for me, I concluded that this was not a casual meeting. Perhaps in the final hour of the meeting, the board had anointed Gandy to deliver a message.
That was the way NSA worked: never confront someone in an open meeting, but send a messenger to deliver the bad news in a secluded office or empty SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility).
“What part of my pitch didn’t pleasantly surprise you?” I asked.
“It wasn’t what you said but what you didn’t say. That was the reason I wanted to chat with you.”
I was expecting him to go on, but he just sat there, regarding me carefully through rimless glasses, wearing a neutral expression—one that I called “the NSA face.” I dreaded and loathed that face, which I had seen on countless agency employees in the six months I’d been at Fort Meade. It seemed that everyone at the agency put on that same blank look when they wanted me to shut up or generally thought I was clueless.
I wondered if Gandy thought I was clueless.
Perhaps I was being tested. I thought out loud. “I left out the surveillance technique you mentioned in the meeting.”
A slow smile spread on his face. “Yes, for sure. But that particular technology is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole universe of exploits you didn’t mention in your plans—ideas that are old but as important today as they were in my time.” Gathering steam, he continued, “You really need to beef up these types of things; they’ve fallen out of favor and could cause us major, major problems.”
He proceeded for the next thirty minutes to give me a tutorial on classic NSA tradecraft that he and his team had perfected when he’d headed the legendary R9 group* in the ’70s and ’80s.
But R9, part of the Research Directorate, no longer existed.
Which was Gandy’s point. He wanted R9, or at least the work it had been doing, to be resurrected.
As Gandy spoke, a transformation came over him, from placid diode who only took things in to an animated, energized teacher explaining a topic he loved. A distinct gleam showed up in his eyes, and his normally slow way of talking accelerated. Gandy’s hands rose and fell like those of an orchestra conductor as he drew imaginary traces of radio frequency (RF) signals on the imaginary screen of a spectrum analyzer, an NSA tool of choice for their work.
The more he went into the physics of R9 old techniques, the more I found myself thinking, Jesus, some of this stuff is older than I am! I had no idea how sophisticated early ’50s technology had been. Listening to Gandy and NSA’s accomplishments from so many years ago felt like discovering that the ancient Egyptians had used gasoline engines or that the Romans had the telegraph.
Despite being in awe of the magic of the technology Gandy had just shared—not to mention the man himself—I had a problem doing as he asked.
I said, “General Hayden [NSA’s director] just came back from the White House yesterday and told me and his other direct reports to get ready for war in Iraq. And we can’t forge
t al-Qaeda. This technology you’re talking about seems geared for big nation-states, not our current crop of hard-to-find targets.”
He nodded. “Sure, but you’ve got plenty of money after 9/11. Why not inject new life into the things I’ve been talking about? Targets like Russia haven’t gone away just because terrorists currently occupy our attention.”
I could see Gandy wasn’t going to give up easily. I didn’t want to alienate him, but at the same time, I’d just finished six months of careful budgeting, and there was no extra money lying around, especially considering that the Research Directorate now had to gear up to support wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trying a different angle, I asked, “Would it really hurt that much if we put off the R9 stuff for a bit, at least until next fiscal year, when I can try to find the extra money? After all, NSA must be ahead of countries like Russia. Russia’s entire economy is smaller than Texas’s, and they’re in a downward spiral. They have to be years, if not decades, behind us.”
Gandy’s white eyebrows raised abruptly, then he leaned forward in his overstuffed armchair. “Now you’ve really got me upset.” His northern Louisiana accent, already thick, got thicker. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that same line of reasoning. It’s technology arrogance, pure and simple. Don’t ever”—which he pronounced eva—“underestimate the Russians. I could tell you stories about them that would curl your toes.”
Alarmed that I had upset an NSA legend, one who would soon be elevated to the rarified ranks of NSA’s equivalent to the Hall of Fame, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “Uh, why don’t you tell me a toe-curling story? I’ve got time if you do.”
This seemed to calm Gandy down. He collected his thoughts, then began to tell me a story that lasted over two hours.
“Okay,” Gandy said, exhaling a deep breath. “Here’s one.”
The Spy in Moscow Station Page 1