Intelligence reporting convinced Ridgway that a storm was about to break on his forces. All intelligence, including that extracted from POWs as early as February 1951, indicated that the Chinese and North Koreans were about to launch their massive Spring “Fifth Phase” Offensive in Korea. SIGINT revealed that there had been two major conferences attended by all Chinese and North Korean army and corps commanders, as well as Russian military advisers, to work out the details of the offensive. Additional intelligence reports received in March indicated that D-day for the Chinese–North Korean offensive was expected to be some time in April. Then on April 1, the North Koreans changed their codes, a sure sign that something dramatic was in the offing. But thanks to the efforts of the U.S. Army code breakers in Korea, within a week the new North Korean ciphers were solved.56
Over the next two weeks, the SIGINT analysts in Washington and Tokyo laid bare the plans for the upcoming Chinese–North Korean offensive. Thanks in large part to SIGINT, Ridgway was able to discern weeks in advance that the brunt of the offensive would come in the mountainous central portion of the front, and not along the flat west coast of Korea north of Seoul. SIGINT also provided a fairly complete picture of the enemy forces committed, specifically four newly arrived Chinese armies plus two North Korean corps. And most important, it provided relatively clear indications about when the offensive would start. SIGINT also detailed the massive buildup of Russian, Chinese, and North Korean combat aircraft in Manchuria, plus attempts by the North Koreans to repair their airfields. When the enemy offensive finally commenced on April 22, Ridgway knew virtually everything about it except the exact time that it was due to begin.57
By the middle of June, SIGINT intercepts of North Korean radio traffic would reveal that the Chinese–North Korean offensive, which had sputtered to a halt earlier that month, had cost the communists a staggering 221,000 Chinese and North Korean casualties. COMINT also provided hard evidence of the communists’ substantial logistical difficulties, which required that tens of thousands of frontline PLA forces be employed behind the lines to keep supply lines open, and documented the severe food shortages being experienced by Chinese forces at the front, which the Chinese commanders blamed for the collapse of the offensive.58
The War Clouds Darken
The shocker came on April 25, three days after the Chinese–North Korean offensive in Korea began, when SIGINT revealed that Soviet air force flight activity throughout the USSR and Eastern Eu rope had ceased completely. American and British radio intercept operators around the world began cabling urgent reports to Washington and London stating that they were picking up virtually no radio chatter coming from any Soviet military airfields in Eastern Eu rope or the Soviet Far East. Alarm bells sounded all over Washington. Soviet air force radio silence was regarded as one of the key indicators that the Soviets were preparing for a military offensive.59
This ominous silence convinced General Ridgway that the Russians were about to launch their much-anticipated air assault against his forces in Korea and Japan. SIGINT showed that the enemy had 860 combat aircraft in Manchuria, 260 of which were modern MiG-15 jet fighters. SIGINT also showed that 380 of the 860 combat aircraft were “controlled” by the Soviet air force, including all of the MiG-15 jet fighters. And SIGINT confirmed that there had been a significant increase in radio traffic between Moscow and the headquarters of the three Long Range Air Force (LRAF) air armies; that there had been an increase in operational flight-training activities by LRAF TU-4 Bull nuclear-capable bombers in the Euro pean portion of the USSR; and that a new Soviet air defense fighter interceptor command headquarters had just been established at Vladivostok and Dairen.60Fortunately, the Soviet air attack never took place.
The Lights Go Out
In the first week of July 1951, just as cease-fire truce talks were getting started at Kaesong, disaster struck the American cryptologic effort in Korea yet again. In a massive shift in their communications and cipher security procedures, the North Korean military stopped using virtually all of the codes and ciphers that the Americans had been successfully exploiting since August 1950, and they replaced them with unbreakable one-time pad cipher systems on all of their high-level and even lower-level radio circuits. Radio frequency changes were now made more often, radio call signs were encrypted, and unencrypted plaintext radio traffic virtually disappeared from North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) radio circuits. Moreover, the North Koreans shifted a significant portion of their operational communications traffic to landline circuits that blocked it from being intercepted.
This move by the North Koreans effectively killed off the sole remaining productive source of high-level COMINT that was then available to American intelligence in the Far East, leaving AFSA and the service cryptologic organizations with only low-level tactical voice communications left as a viable source of intelligence. Today, NSA officials believe that this move was prompted by Soviet security advisers with the North Korean forces, who were alarmed at the shoddy communications security (COMSEC) procedures utilized by the North Korean forces.61
The Good, the Bad, and the Really Ugly
On the positive side for the COMINT community, during the first and most perilous year of the Korean War, AFSA and the military COMINT units in the Far East were virtually the only source of timely and reliable intelligence for American field commanders in Korea about North Korean military activities. But the agency’s cryptanalysts were never able to solve any of the high-level ciphers used by the Chinese military in Korea, which meant that American commanders in the Far East never truly understood their principal enemy’s intentions or capabilities.
A former NSA historian concluded, “There were successes, there were failures, but the failures tended to overshadow the successes.”62The net result was that SIGINT did not provide anywhere near the quantity or quality of high-level strategic intelligence that it had during World War II. According to a declassified NSA study, there were numerous successes during the Korean War; “to most intelligence consumers, however, the results still looked extremely thin, especially with the lack of COMINT from [high-level] communications.”63
CHAPTER 3
Fight for Survival
The Creation of the National Security Agency
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
—W. B. YEATS, "THE SECOND COMING"
The Dog Has Teeth: The Arrival of
General Ralph Canine
Among those inside the U.S. intelligence community who were privy to AFSA’s secrets, the announcement of fifty-five-year-old army major general Ralph Canine’s appointment as AFSA director in July 1951 came as a huge surprise, but it didn’t cause even a ripple in the newspapers because few members of the press or public had any idea of what the agency did. Not only was General Canine (pronounced keh-NINE) not a West Point graduate, but he also had very little prior experience in intelligence (he had only served as the deputy chief of Army G-2 for ten months before being named to the post at AFSA), and he knew nothing whatsoever about codes and ciphers.1He was promoted to lieutenant general and became the second— and last—AFSA director.
Intelligence insiders had expected that Brigadier General Carter Clarke, a veteran intelligence officer with long experience with SIGINT, would be appointed to the position. But Clarke, then commanding a logistics unit in Japan, wanted nothing to do with the deeply troubled AFSA and nixed his own nomination, as did virtually every other senior army and air force intelligence officer qualified for the post. So Canine got the job by default. He told friends that he had initially been “violently against” becoming the head of AFSA, preferring instead to take retirement after thirty-five years of military service, including combat duty in two world wars. But he had been convinced by colleagues in Army G-2 to take the job against his better judgment.2
Canine was “old army”—a tough and efficient chief of staff of a corps in General George Patton’s Third Army, where he w
as famous for “kicking the ass” of recalcitrant division and regimental commanders. And that is exactly what Canine did at AFSA. In much the same way that his counterpart at the CIA, General Walter Smith, rebuilt and reinvigorated his dormant intelligence organization, so too did General Canine. In the six years (1951 to 1956) that he served as the director of AFSA and then the National Security Agency, the hard-charging Canine made his organization a force to be reckoned with inside the U.S. intelligence community.3
But even the resourceful Canine could not overcome the myriad problems that bedeviled his organization. Among other things, SIGINT produced by AFSA still did not provide U.S. forces in Korea and its other customers with the intelligence (in quantity and quality) they needed. The squabbling and feuding within AFSA itself was causing no end of problems for the agency’s managers, who were struggling to help win the war in Korea as well as handle a series of potentially explosive international crises. Senior army and navy officers at AFSA fought vicious internal bureaucratic battles with one another as well as their air force counterparts. And all three of the military services refused to cooperate with the agency’s civilian customers at the FBI, CIA, and State Department. To say that AFSA was dysfunctional would be an understatement.4
Canine had a real fight on his hands. Internally, he made sweeping changes in the agency’s management in January 1952. One of those who would leave in the middle of this reorganization was Frank Rowlett. Like many of his colleagues, he found this radical house cleaning to be the proverbial final straw. Angry and frustrated, in a fit of spite Rowlett accepted the offer of a job helping the CIA build its own SIGINT organization.5
Canine fought off attacks from the military services and tried to defend the agency against the increasingly hostile criticism of its customers, but ultimately he lost the battle. In November 1951, CIA director Smith struck a mortal blow. Smith knew that the armed services would try to seize their shares of control of SIGINT if AFSA were to be dismantled, and he believed that SIGINT had to be consolidated in the form of an entirely new entity. His bureaucratic masterstroke was instigating the creation of an “outside” committee to evaluate and, hopefully, doom AFSA. The committee was headed by George Brownell, a New York corporate lawyer and a good friend of the CIA’s deputy director, Allen Dulles. The military services were completely shut out. The only representa -tion on the Brownell Committee the military got was Canine, who held the nominal position of consul tant but was not a voting member. From the makeup of the committee, senior military officials knew that they were not going to like what came out of its work.6
Rain of Devastation: The Brownell Committee Report
At ten forty-five a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 13, 1952, President Truman welcomed CIA director Smith and James Lay Jr., executive secretary of the National Security Council (NSC), into the Oval Office at the White House for a regularly scheduled meeting. Smith, however, was the bearer of bad tidings. He reached into his briefcase and gave Truman a copy of a 141-page Top Secret Codeword report on the state of health of the U.S. national SIGINT effort. It was the much-anticipated Brownell Report on AFSA.7
It is clear in reading between the lines of the Brownell Committee’s report that all of the managerial sins of the agency’s leadership would have been forgiven if AFSA had been producing decent intelligence. But it was not.
The Brownell Committee called for a complete overhaul and reorganization of AFSA. In effect, Brownell and his fellow committee members recommended scrapping it in its current form because it was unsalvageable. Instead, they recommended replacing it with a new unified SIGINT agency that would possess greater authority to operate a modern, centralized global SIGINT effort on behalf of the U.S. government.
Not surprisingly, Smith and Secretary of State Dean Acheson enthusiastically endorsed the committee’s recommendations. Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett also approved the report’s findings. By September 1952, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military services, under intense pressure from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, reluctantly accepted most of the recommendations. Throughout October, Canine tried unsuccessfully to negotiate some changes in the wording of a draft directive to be signed by Truman; that would have given the new agency more power to do its own analysis, but this proposal was summarily shot down. Canine was told in no uncertain terms that the deal was done and that it was time for him to take his seat and let events take their course.8
The Birth of the National Security Agency
At ten forty-five a.m. on Friday morning, October 24, 1952, Smith and Lay returned to the White House to meet with Truman only four months after Smith had given him his copy of the Brownell Report. After the usual handshakes and brief pleasantries, Lay placed on Truman’s desk a buff file folder with a “Top Secret” cover sheet stapled to its front. Inside the folder was an eight-page document titled “Communications Intelligence Activities,” which had a tab at the rear indicating where the president’s signature was required. We do not know what, if anything, was said among the three men. All we know for certain is that Truman signed the document, and ten minutes later Smith and Lay walked out of the Oval Office with the file folder. Except for Truman, Smith, and Lay, very few people in Washington knew that the president had just presided over the creation of the National Security Agency (NSA).9
The eight-page directive that Truman had signed made SIGINT a national responsibility and designated the secretary of defense as the U.S. government’s executive agent for all SIGINT activities, which placed NSA within the ambit of the Defense Department and outside the jurisdiction of the CIA. Truman gave NSA a degree of power and authority above and beyond that ever given previously or since to any American intelligence agency, placing it outside the rubric of the rest of the U.S. intelligence community. Truman also ordered that the new agency’s powers be clearly defined and strengthened through the issuance of a new directive titled National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 9 “Communications Intelligence.”10The creation of NSA got in just under the wire. November 4, 1952, was Election Day in America. That evening, Dwight Eisenhower won in a landslide, decisively beating Adlai Stevenson to become the next president of the United States.
CHAPTER 4
The Inventory of Ignorance
SIGINT During the Eisenhower Administration:
1953–1961
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
—DESIDERIUS ERASMUS
The Unhappy Inheritance
Dwight Eisenhower was sworn in as the thirty-fourth president of the United States on Tuesday, January 20, 1953. As supreme allied commander in Europe and a top customer for Ultra decrypts during World War II, he understood more about the value of intelligence (and its limitations) than any president since Ulysses S. Grant. But nothing could have prepared Eisenhower for what he confronted when he took office.
Five weeks after his inauguration, on March 4, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin suddenly died. Eisenhower was not happy that the first news that he got of Stalin’s death came from Associated Press and United Press International wire service reports from Moscow. Like the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, NSA had provided no indication whatsoever that Stalin was ill. In fact, in the month before Stalin’s death NSA had sent to the White House decrypted messages from the Argentinean and Indian ambassadors in Moscow detailing their private audiences with the Russian dictator, which tended to suggest to the intelligence analysts that the Russian dictator’s health was good. In the chaotic days after Stalin’s death, the only SIGINT that NSA could provide the White House with were decrypted tele grams concerning the reactions of Western leaders and a number of foreign Communist Party chiefs to the death of Stalin. All in all, it was not a very impressive per formance.1
Concern inside Washington about NSA’s per formance mounted when on June 16, rioting broke out in East Berlin as thousands of civilian protesters took to the streets en masse to register their pent-up anger at the continued occupation of their
country by the Russians. Within twenty-four hours, the rioting had spread to virtually every other city in East Germany. NSA’s performance during the early stages of the Berlin Crisis was viewed in Washington as disappointing because most of the early intelligence reaching the White House about what was transpiring in East Berlin came from the CIA’s Berlin station and from wire service news reports, with very little coming from NSA.2
Trying to Peer Behind the Iron Curtain
Regrettably, the reason SIGINT provided no warning was because Soviet high-grade ciphers remained “an unrevealed mystery.”3: p. 367.Despite the commitment of massive numbers of personnel and equally massive amounts of equipment to this critically important target, there is little discernible evidence that any progress was made in this area. And as the years passed and the Russian ciphers continued to elude NSA’s ability to solve them, the pressure on the agency inexorably mounted to do whatever it took for a breakthrough. A Top Secret report sent to Eisenhower in May 1955 recommended, “This is of such great importance that monetary considerations should be waived and an effort at least equal to the Manhattan Project should be exerted at once.” But Frank Rowlett, who was now the head of the CIA’s own SIGINT organization, Staff D, was not impressed with the increasingly urgent recommendations coming out of the multitude of blue-ribbon panels, study groups, review panels, and committees created during the 1950s to find a solution to NSA’s code-breaking problems, telling an interviewer decades later, “Most of the people on these panels would not have known a Russian cipher if it hit them on the head . . . Rule by committee is a terrible way to run a spy agency.”4
The Secret Sentry Page 6