NSA’s SIGINT effort against mainland China was even more frustrating than the Russian problem. Unlike the attack on the Russian ciphers, which received unlimited attention and resources, the NSA cryptanalytic attack on Chinese codes and ciphers was hampered by perpetual shortages of manpower and equipment. The result was that virtually no progress was being made in solving any of the high-grade Chinese cipher systems and NSA had to be content with exploiting low-level Chinese plaintext radio traffic and traffic analysis for information about what was going on inside China. And as if this situation was not bad enough already, after the signing of the July 1953 armistice agreement in Korea, NSA lost most of its access to Chinese and North Korean military communications when these forces switched from radio to landlines. A February 1954 report to the NSC conceded the result: that relatively little was known about what was going on inside China. And a recently declassified CIA report bluntly states, “The picture for the major target area in Asia, i.e. Communist China, is very dark.”5
1956—The Year of Crisis
As NSA was in the process of moving from Arlington Hall to its new headquarters at Fort Meade, in Maryland, in the fall of 1956, NSA was struck nearly simultaneously by three international crises that stretched the agency’s resources to the limit.
The first was the violent worker riots that took place in the Polish city of Poznan in late June 1956. The riots were crushed by Polish troops using live ammunition, and at least fifty civilians were killed. The events precipitated a political crisis within the hard-line Polish government. When the Polish Communist Party met in Warsaw on October 19, it elected a progressive-minded reformer named Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had just been released from prison for having been a “counterrevolutionary,” as Poland’s new leader. NSA immediately picked up indications that the Russians were preparing to use military force against Poland. The crisis was defused on October 24, when Gomulka reaffirmed Poland’s political and military ties with the USSR, leading the Russians to order their troops to return to their barracks.6
On the afternoon of October 23, the day before Gomulka ended the Polish crisis, peaceful anti-Soviet demonstrations in downtown Budapest escalated into a full-blown armed insurrection against the Soviet-backed, hard-line communist Hungarian government. Hungary immediately called for Soviet military assistance in putting down the riots, which by the end of the day had spread from Budapest to a number of other major Hungarian cities. Within hours of the rioting’s breaking out in Budapest, the twenty-seven thousand Russian troops based inside Hungary began to move. Early on the morning of October 24, intercept operators at the U.S. Army listening post at Bad Aibling Station, in West Germany, began noting all four Russian combat divisions based in Hungary rapidly converging on Budapest. At ten twenty-eight a.m., the Bad Aibling listening post intercepted an order passed in the clear from the commander of the Russian Second Guards Mechanized Division authorizing his troops to use their tank cannons and heavy artillery to “disperse the rioters” in Budapest. It marked the beginning of a bloody day of street fighting between Russian troops and Hungarian civilians throughout the city. By the end of the day 24, radio intercepts reaching NSA had revealed that selected Soviet Long Range Air Force bomber units in the western USSR had been placed on a heightened state of alert, as had selected Russian ground, air, and naval forces stationed in Eastern Eu rope, especially in East Germany.7
By October 27, SIGINT had confirmed that there were now four full-strength Russian combat divisions totaling forty thousand troops deployed in and around virtually all major Hungarian cities, with especially high numbers in Budapest. SIGINT showed that the Russian Second Guards Mechanized Division and the Thirty-second Mechanized Division had borne the brunt of the fighting up until that point in downtown Budapest, with the intercepts reflecting heavy personnel and equipment losses among those troops as well as severe ammunition shortages in some units. Intercepts also showed that large numbers of seriously wounded Russian military personnel were being airlifted from the Budapest-Tokol airport to the city of L’vov in the USSR. The problem for Russia was that the Hungarian rioters still controlled large portions of Budapest and other major Hungarian cities.8
Then two days later, on the morning of October 29, Israeli forces attacked Egyptian forces based in the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. Tensions in the Middle East had been building since June, when Egypt forced the British to remove the last of their forces from the Suez Canal, which had been nationalized. Since early October, NSA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community had been intensively tracking the buildup of Israeli forces along the border with Egypt, as well as a comparable buildup of French and British forces on Cyprus. By October 27, all signs pointed to an imminent Israeli attack on Egypt. A report was sent out by the CIA that afternoon stating, “The likelihood has increased of major Israeli reprisals, probably against Egypt, in the near future.” The next day, SIGINT reports coming out of NSA confirmed that Israel was about to attack Egypt, with fragmentary SIGINT reports indicating that British forces based on Cyprus appeared ready to strike Egypt as well. Later that afternoon, NSA reported to the White House that it had monitored a massive jump in diplomatic communications traffic passing between Tel Aviv and Paris. This led CIA analysts to conclude, correctly as it turned out, that “France [might] be planning [military] actions in conjunction with Israel against Egypt.”9
The following morning, October 29, the deputy director of the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence, Knight McMahan, was about to brief Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson at his hotel in Boston. According to McMahan’s recollection, the previous day “the Watch Committee was reviewing newly available intelligence confirming that Israel, with British and French support, was completing its mobilization and would attack Egypt. Because the evidence came from intercepted communications, this sensitive information was not included in the written briefing materials prepared for Stevenson.” Instead, McMahan intended to handle this breaking story orally. But before McMahan could utter a word, one of Stevenson’s aides rushed into the room to announce that according to wire service reports, Israeli troops had launched their offensive against Egyptian forces in the Sinai.10A furious Eisenhower, reacting to the invasion, called British prime minister Anthony Eden and asked his old friend if he had gone out of his mind.
Six days later, on November 4, while the fighting in the Sinai was still raging, Soviet military forces in Hungary moved to crush once and for all the uprising in Budapest and other cities. Two days before the Soviets moved, SIGINT showed that they were up to something. Beginning on the evening of November 2, SIGINT detected massive Soviet troop movements inside Hungary, as well as troop reinforcements crossing into the country from the western USSR. Clearly, the Soviet military was preparing to attack. On the morning of November 4, Soviet troops attacked Budapest and other Hungarian cities that had risen up in revolt. By eight a.m., Soviet troops had captured the Hungarian parliament building in downtown Budapest and had arrested virtually the entire Hungarian government and parliament, including the newly elected reformist prime minister Imre Nagy. The battle for Budapest was over even before it started. An estimated twenty-five thousand Hungarians were killed in the uprising. Again, Soviet casualty figures are unknown, but were probably heavy.11(There is an ongoing debate about the extent of the CIA’s role in encouraging the uprising. In any event, Eisenhower decided not to intervene in Hungary, disavowed any involvement in or approval of the Suez invasion, and effectively forced Israel, France, and Britain to put an end to it.)
On the afternoon of November 4, NSA declared an alert and placed all its assets in a heightened state of readiness. The alert, which was designated Yankee, was prompted by a series of bombastic threats issued by senior Soviet leaders threatening to intervene militarily in the Middle East, as well as some fragmentary intelligence indicating that Soviet military forces in Eastern Europe and the western USSR had dramatically increased their readiness levels. There was also some intelligence indica
ting that between two and four Soviet attack submarines had been sent into the Mediterranean. But SIGINT confirmed that Soviet military forces, such as their crack airborne troops, had not been placed on alert, and there were no indications of Soviet forces being redeployed in preparation for intervention in the Middle East conflict. A declassified NSA history notes, “Timely reporting over a period of months could have left no doubt within the [Eisenhower] administration that Soviet diplomacy consisted of posturing. They were not going to go down to the Middle East to bail out anyone. Forces just weren’t moving.”12
The output that NSA produced during these crises indicates that the agency performed creditably. In the weeks leading up to the 1956 Arab-Israeli War, SIGINT proved to be a critically important source of intelligence indicating that war was imminent. A declassified 1957 CIA postmortem evaluation of U.S. intelligence per formance prior to the Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt notes that “the Watch Committee, in October 1956, provided several days of advance warning of the imminent possibility of Israeli-Egyptian hostilities and 24 hours’ specific warning of Israel’s intention to attack Egypt with French and (initially) tacit British support.”13During the Soviet military intervention in Hungary, an NSA history notes, SIGINT “provided fairly complete indicators concerning Soviet military unit movements throughout the crisis.” The NSA history also makes clear that SIGINT was the only reliable intelligence source available to the U.S. intelligence community on Soviet military movements and activities in Hungary.14
Despite providing timely intelligence, NSA’s overall per formance revealed that the agency’s hidebound bureaucracy had trouble reacting rapidly to extraordinary circumstances. NSA was roundly criticized for the intelligence material that it produced. A declassified NSA history notes, “As for crisis response, all was chaos. The cryptologic community proved incapable of marshaling its forces in a flexible fashion to deal with developing trouble spots. The events of the year did not demonstrate success— they simply provided a case study to learn from.”15
The Samford Era at NSA
On November 23, 1956, General Ralph Canine retired after almost forty years in the U.S. Army. His replacement as NSA director was Lieutenant General John Samford of the U.S. Air Force. Born in tiny Hagerman, New Mexico, on August 29, 1905, Samford graduated from West Point in 1928 and joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. During World War II, he served as the chief of staff of the Eighth Air Force from 1942 until 1944, then at the Pentagon as a senior intelligence officer. After the war, Samford held a series of senior intelligence billets, becoming the chief of U.S. Air Force intelligence in 1951. He held this position until becoming NSA’s vice director in July 1956, then director four months later, in November 1956.16
As head of air force intelligence, Samford was well known as a defense hawk and one of the primary proponents within the air force of the idea that the Soviets were seeking strategic nuclear superiority over the United States. Many senior NSA staff also remembered Samford’s strident opposition to the formation of NSA in October 1952. When he was announced as the new director, many of the civilian staff at Fort Meade were alarmed about what his appointment would mean for the agency.17
But Samford proved to be a pleasant surprise. Polished and thoughtful, he quickly became a convert to the idea that the rapidly growing NSA would someday be a superpower within the American intelligence community. His quiet but diligent work on behalf of the agency earned him the informal moniker Slamming Sammy among his staff. Samford also moved rapidly to heal the gaping wounds that had developed in the relationship between NSA and the CIA during Canine’s tumultuous tenure. A declassified NSA history notes, “Samford was a consummate diplomat, and he probably gained more by soft-soaping the downtown intelligence people than Canine could have done through head-on collisions.”18
Forward! Ever Forward!
Just as his predecessor had, Samford found that the Soviet Union ate up the vast majority of NSA’s SIGINT collection resources. But like his predecessor’s, Samford’s tenure was marked by the continuing failure of the agency’s cryptanalysts to break into the Soviet high-grade ciphers. Just as in baseball, NSA’s senior leadership tried to shake up the management of their cryptanalytic effort to see if that would produce results, but to no avail.
By 1958, a whopping 54 percent of NSA’s SIGINT collection resources were dedicated to monitoring military and civilian targets inside the Soviet Union. But NSA’s cryptanalysts had actually lost ground since the Korean War. The Russians put a series of new and improved cipher machines into service, each of which was harder to solve than the machines they replaced. And the communications traffic generated by these machines remained impenetrable. The Soviets also continued to shift an ever-increasing percentage of their secret communications from the airwaves to telegraph lines, buried cables, and micro wave radio-relay systems, which was a simple and effective way of keeping this traffic away from NSA’s thousands of radio intercept operators.19
NSA and the U-2 Overflight Program
Even if NSA’s cryptanalysts were stymied by the Russian high-grade ciphers, other branches of NSA were producing intelligence. One of the most important, albeit unheralded, missions performed by NSA during General Samford’s tenure was providing SIGINT support to the CIA’s U-2 reconnaissance aircraft that were engaged in secretly overflying the USSR. Declassified documents show that between April 1956 and May 1960, the CIA conducted twenty-four U-2 overflights of the USSR, which produced some of the most important intelligence information about what the Russians were up for the information-starved American intelligence analysts back in Washington.20
Although it is not recognized in CIA literature on the U-2 program, newly declassified documents show that over time a close and symbiotic relationship developed between NSA and CIA. NSA derived incredibly valuable intelligence about Soviet military capabilities by monitoring how the Soviets reacted to each U-2 overflight. And over time, the CIA increasingly came to depend on intelligence information collected by NSA in order to target the U-2 over-flights, with a declassified NSA history noting that as time went by SIGINT “became more and more a cue card for U-2 missions.”21
The genesis of the NSA-CIA relationship regarding the U-2 program dates back to a Top Secret May 1956 agreement between the CIA and NSA, whereby NSA’s listening posts situated around the Soviet periphery were tasked with closely monitoring Soviet air defense reactions to each U-2 over-flight mission by intercepting the radio transmissions of Soviet radar operators as they tracked the CIA reconnaissance aircraft flying deep inside their country. The American radio intercept operators could copy the radio transmissions of Soviet radar operators deep inside the USSR, in some cases thousands of miles away. This meant that American radio intercept operators in England and Germany could listen to Soviet radar operators in the Urals or deep inside Kazakhstan as they excitedly tracked the flight paths of the U-2s. A former U.S. Air Force intercept operator recalled, “We could track our U-2s using the Soviet’s own radar, long after our U-2s were out of the range of our own long range radar stations.”22
The intercepts stemming from the U-2 overflights proved to be an intelligence bonanza for the analysts in NSA’s Soviet Air Division, headed by a veteran U.S. Air Force SIGINT officer named Colonel Harry Towler Jr. Between 1956 and 1960, Towler’s division produced reams of reports detailing the strength, readiness, and capabilities of the Soviet air defense forces. Intercepts collected during the early U-2 overflights in the summer of 1956 re-vealed that the accuracy of the Soviet radars was not very good, but over time their accuracy improved markedly as new systems were introduced. The intercepts also revealed that the command and control network of the huge Soviet air defense system was cumbersome, and oftentimes very slow to react to extraordinary situations. A former NSA analyst involved in the program recalled that by correlating intercepts of Soviet radar tracking transmissions with intercepts of Russian early-warning radars, he could literally “time with a stopwatch” how fast the Russians r
eacted to each individual U-2 overflight. SIGINT also revealed that the Soviet air defense fighter force was larger than previously believed. Every time a U-2 conducted an overflight of the USSR, the Soviets scrambled dozens of fighter interceptors from different bases to try to shoot the aircraft down. By monitoring the air-to-ground radio traffic between the fighters and their home bases, NSA was able to identify dozens of previously unknown Soviet air defense fighter regiments throughout the USSR.23
The U-2 intercepts also revealed how poor the operating capabilities of the Soviet fighters and their pilots sometimes were. While in training in the U.S. during the 1960s, a former USAFSS Russian linguist listened to a training tape of intercepted PVO air-to-ground radio transmissions during an attempt by Russian MiG fighters to shoot down a CIA U-2 reconnaissance aircraft flying over Russia. The linguist recalled that one of the MiG fighters flew too high, which resulted in the plane’s jet engines flaming out. The pilot could not restart his engine at such a high altitude, and his plane plummeted to the earth. As caught on the tape, the Russian MiG pilot spent his last seconds alive screaming “Beda! Beda!” (Mayday! Mayday!) into his radio set before his plane crashed and the radio transmission abruptly went dead.24
The Fool’s Errand: NSA and the 1960 U-2 Shootdown
At eight thirty-six on the morning of May 1, 1960, a Russian SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile (SAM) fired by a battery of the Fifty-seventh Anti-Aircraft Rocket Brigade, commanded by Major Mikhail Voronov, shot down a CIA U-2 reconnaissance aircraft piloted by Francis Gary Powers deep inside Russia near the city of Sverdlovsk.25
NSA was deeply involved in all aspects of Gary Powers’s ill-fated mission. Many of the top targets that the mission was supposed to cover had been identified by SIGINT, including suspected Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch sites at Polyarnyy Ural, Yur’ya, and Verkhnyaya Salda and an alleged missile production facility in Sverdlovsk. But one of the main targets of Powers’s overflight mission was to confirm reports received from NSA that the Russians were building an ICBM launch site in northern Russia somewhere along the Vologda-Arkhangel’sk railroad in the vicinity of the frigid village of Plesetsk. As it turned out, the SIGINT reporting was correct: The Russians had begun building their first operational ICBM site at Plesetsk in July 1957 and had completed construction in mid-1959. Between December 1959 and February 1960, Norwegian listening posts in northern Norway had intercepted Russian radio traffic suggesting that Soviet missile activity was then being conducted at Plesetsk, which Power’s mission was supposed to confirm.26
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