The Secret Sentry

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The Secret Sentry Page 8

by Matthew M. Aid


  As with all previous U-2 overflights of the USSR, NSA was able to monitor Soviet air defense reactions to the mission. The man at NSA headquarters responsible for running this operation was Henry Fenech, who headed NSA’s Soviet Air Defense Branch. Well before Powers’s U-2 took off from Peshawar airfield in northern Pakistan, Fenech had become concerned about the safety of the U-2 aircraft. There were clear signs appearing in SIGINT that the Soviet air defenses were getting better, and that they were getting close to being able to shoot down a U-2. 27

  Powers’s mission did not begin well. Even before his U-2 reached the Soviet border on May 1, intercepted Soviet air defense tracking communications showed that his plane had been detected and was being closely tracked by Russian early-warning radars. While the U-2 streaked northward into the heart of Russia, NSA intercept operators in Karamursel, Turkey, listened intently as Soviet radar operators continued to track the plane. Then something went terribly wrong. The intercepts of Soviet air defense radar tracking showed that just north of Sverdlovsk, Powers’s aircraft descended from over sixty-five thousand feet to somewhere between thirty thousand and forty thousand feet, changed course to head back toward Sverdlovsk, then disappeared completely off the Soviet radar screens thirty-five minutes later. Fenech could only report to the CIA that the U-2 “had been lost due to unexplained causes.” But in a follow-up report, Fenech’s analysts stated that based on intercepts of Soviet radar tracking communications, they believed that Powers’s aircraft might have been hit by the SAM at an altitude of between thirty thousand and forty thousand feet while descending, and not at an altitude of sixty-five thousand feet as Powers claimed.28

  The downing of the U-2 was a major diplomatic disaster. It took place just two weeks before Eisenhower (who had to authorize all such overflights and had very reluctantly allowed this one—to take place no later than May 2) was to meet with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev for a crucial summit meeting in Geneva. Not only did the Soviets capture Powers after he parachuted from his doomed aircraft, but they also displayed pieces of the latter (along with Powers) in public. The summit meeting, like the U-2, was shot down by the Russians. And a very unhappy Eisenhower wanted an explanation of what had gone wrong.

  Fenech’s report stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy, with CIA officials vehemently denying its conclusions. But it was not until Powers returned to the United States in February 11, 1962, after being traded for convicted Soviet spy Rudolph Abel, that NSA “got its day in court.” Admiral Laurence Frost— who had replaced General Samford as director of NSA in November 1960— and his analysts attended a contentious CIA board of inquiry, convened on February 19, at which Fenech was grilled for hours by board member John Bross, a former lawyer and a veteran CIA officer, about his conclusions, and Fenech continued to insist that the intercepted Soviet air defense tracking showed that Powers was flying much lower than he claimed. The CIA board maintained, however, that the Soviet radar operators had been mistaken about the altitude. So on February 27, 1962, the board sent a Top Secret report to CIA director John McCone and President John Kennedy that cleared Powers of any culpability or negligence, concluding that “the evidence establishes overwhelmingly that Powers’ account was a truthful account.”29

  Louis Tordella, NSA’s deputy director, was incensed, telling CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston that “the markedly hostile nature of much of the questioning indicated that the Board had already decided on a course of action which was not supported by the NSA produced materials.” But the politically astute Tordella ultimately conceded that the board had arrived at the “best” decision— i.e., one that protected the reputation of the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community.30

  CHAPTER 5

  The Crisis Years

  SIGINT and the Kennedy Administration:

  1961–1963

  It may not be war, but it sure as hell ain’t peace.

  —MAJOR GENERAL STEVEN ARNOLD

  Jack Frost’s 600 Days

  On January 20, 1961, John Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth president of the United States. His national security advisers quickly discovered that NSA was the most important, the largest, and the most expensive component of the U.S. intelligence community. With a budget of $654 million and employing 59,000 military and civilian personnel, NSA was truly a behemoth. By way of comparison, the CIA consisted of only 16,685 personnel, with a budget of $401.6 million.1

  Leaders in the intelligence community had worried about the tendency of NSA’s director, Lieutenant General John Samford, to focus on meeting the demands of the Pentagon rather than on making NSA a strong national intelligence organization. A search had been mounted to find a successor who could do just that.2

  Vice Admiral Laurence “Jack” Frost seemed to have the requisite qualifications for the job. Quiet and soft-spoken, Frost had replaced Samford as the director of NSA on November 24, 1960. A native of Fayetteville, Arkansas, Frost was a 1926 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. He spent his formative years in the navy as a gunnery and communications officer, and he was in command of the destroyer USS Greer when it was attacked on September 4, 1941, by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic while on a mail run to Iceland, a seminal event that helped propel the United States into World War II. During the war, Frost commanded a destroyer and served as a communications officer in the Pacific. He returned to Washington in September 1945 and became an intelligence officer, commanding the unit of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) that managed the navy’s SIGINT processing and reporting efforts, then ONI’s Intelligence Estimates Division. After more sea duty, Frost served as NSA’s chief of staff from 1953 to 1955, then became the director of ONI on May 16, 1956. He remained at the helm until becoming NSA director in 1960.3

  But Frost turned out to be a disaster as head of NSA. During his twenty-month tenure, the vice admiral, used to naval discipline and unquestioning obedience to orders, soon found that his civilian staffers would not toe the line, so he surrounded himself with some naval officers who would. Senior civilian managers dubbed them the Navy Cabal and saw Frost as a threat to their management control over the agency. In response, his senior civilian staff fought him on policy issues and began sabotaging many of his initiatives behind his back.4

  Frost also never developed a good rapport with the Kennedy administration, which made it difficult for him to protect NSA’s in dependence from the encroachment of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his top deputies as well as the CIA, headed by John McCone. By the spring of 1962, McNa-mara was fed up with Frost and fired him. Today it is hard to find former NSA officials who have anything good to say about Vice Admiral Frost.

  NSA Enters the War in Vietnam

  At the time the Kennedy administration entered the White House, in January 1961, NSA was devoting few resources to monitoring events in Asia. Of the agency’s total SIGINT collection resources, 50 percent were devoted to the Soviet Union, 8.4 percent to Asian communist targets, and 7.6 percent to noncommunist countries elsewhere around the world, which in NSA parlance were known as the ALLO (all other) nations. The remaining 34 percent was working staff positions and other esoteric collection functions, such as electronic intelligence.5

  The man heading NSA’s SIGINT collection operations in the Far East was Dr. Lawrance Shinn, who had been chief of NSA’s Office of Asiatic Communist Countries (ACOM) since 1959. Like many of his colleagues at the time, Larry Shinn was not a professional cryptologist. The holder of a B.S. degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in bacteriology from the University of Pittsburgh, Shinn had joined the U.S. Navy cryptologic orga-nization during World War II. He quickly demonstrated a modest talent for code breaking but even more impressive skills as a manager, which led to his meteoric rise after the war within AFSA, then NSA.6

  As of 1961, the vast majority of Shinn’s SIGINT collection and analytic resources were focused on mainland China, with a smaller effort targeting North Korea. NSA had a small number of SIGINT inte
rcept positions at its two listening posts in the Philippines covering North Vietnam and Viet Cong guerrilla activities in South Vietnam, though those facilities devoted more of their resources to China traffic. Back at Fort Meade, what SIGINT reporting was being produced conclusively showed that the Viet Cong insurgency was being directed and supported by North Vietnam through a clandestine radio network that extended from Hanoi to 114 Viet Cong radio stations spread throughout South Vietnam.7

  Until 1960, NSA was able to read with relative ease the high-level diplomatic and military cipher systems of North Vietnam. But the agency’s window into these communications closed quickly. In the fall of that year, the North Vietnamese began changing all of their codes to a new unbreakable cipher system called KTB. The first systems to “go black” were all of the high-level North Vietnamese government and military ciphers, and over the next two years North Vietnam converted all of the ciphers used by its military to KTB. The first changes in Viet Cong cipher usage came in the fall of 1961, and then on April 14, 1962, all one-hundred-plus Viet Cong radio transmitters in South Vietnam “executed a major, nearly total communications and cryptographic change on their military and political-military networks.” All high-level North Vietnamese and Viet Cong ciphers became unreadable to the cryptanalysts at NSA, forcing the agency to rely, for the rest of the Vietnam War, on the exploitation of low-level North Vietnamese and Viet Cong cipher systems, plaintext intercepts, and traffic analysis.8

  In the summer of 1960, the increasing intensity of the Viet Cong insurrection in South Vietnam forced the U.S. intelligence community to devote more resources to monitoring Viet Cong activity. Since existing security regulations barred the United States from giving direct SIGINT support to the South Vietnamese government, the CIA chief of station in Taiwan, Ray Cline, was asked by Washington to see if the Taiwanese intelligence services “would assist the South Vietnamese in methods for collecting intelligence, including signals interception and the flying of clandestine missions behind enemy lines.”9But the Taiwanese personnel ultimately sent to South Vietnam spent most of their time intercepting Chinese military radio traffic, at which they excelled, and made no real contribution to the war effort. Efforts by the commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Group (MAAG) in Vietnam, Lieutenant General L. C. McGarr, to convince the newly installed Kennedy administration of the need to provide the South Vietnamese with SIGINT equipment were met by stiff resistance from the U.S. intelligence community, especially NSA, which was naturally reluctant to provide the South Vietnamese with sensitive American SIGINT technology.10

  In March 1961, the U.S. Intelligence Board (USIB) approved a wide range of new clandestine intelligence collection and covert action programs, including a classified CIA program to drop large numbers of agents into North Vietnam, as well as a sizable expansion of NSA’s SIGINT collection program for both Viet Cong and North Vietnamese communications. The USIB also approved a parallel program that authorized the ASA to train South Vietnamese military personnel in SIGINT collection. On April 29, 1961, President Kennedy and the NSC approved the plan, including giving limited intelligence information derived from SIGINT to the South Vietnamese military.11

  On May 12, 1961, McGarr, Ambassador Frederick Nolting Jr., and the CIA’s Saigon chief of station, William Colby, obtained South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem’s approval to deploy American SIGINT troops to South Vietnam. The next day, the first contingent of ninety-three ASA personnel, calling themselves the Third Radio Research Unit under the command of Lieutenant Colonel William Cochrane, flew into Tan Son Nhut Air Base outside Saigon and moved its Morse intercept operators into vans parked alongside the runways. Their presence was to be kept top secret. The army SIGINT troops wore civilian clothes and were barred from carry ing military ID cards in order to provide cover, which must have deceived very few, since all of them wore sidearms and carried M-1 rifles everywhere they went. For additional cover, their medical rec-ords were stamped, “If injured or killed in combat, report as training accident in the Philippines.”12To preserve security as well as cover, Washington tactfully declined to give in to the South Vietnamese government and military’s demands for full access to the unit’s operations spaces and the intelligence information that it produced.13

  But as of the fall of 1961, the SIGINT effort was producing virtually no hard intelligence about the strength, capabilities, and activities of the Viet Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam. A Top Secret November 1961 report to the White House by General Maxwell Taylor recommended that NSA “adjust its priorities of effort and allocations of personnel and material, both in Washington and Vietnam, as required to break Viet Cong communications codes.” His findings, coupled with the rapidly deteriorating military situation in South Vietnam, led President Kennedy to authorize yet another dramatic increase in the number of American troops and advisers in South Vietnam. As part of the buildup, an additional 279 ASA personnel were ordered to be deployed to South Vietnam by January 14, 1962, to augment the Third Radio Research Unit.14

  Operation Mongoose

  Pursuant to a November 30, 1961, directive from Kennedy, the CIA began planning a large-scale covert operation called Mongoose, whose purpose was to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba through a combination of guerrilla attacks by CIA-trained Cuban exiles and the judicious use of political, economic, and psychological warfare.15This regime change plan naturally had the full support of the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff going so far as to write, “The United States cannot tolerate [the] permanent existence of a communist government in the Western Hemi sphere.”16

  Between January and March 1962, all branches of the U.S. intelligence community, including NSA, were tasked with increased coverage of Cuba to support the CIA’s Mongoose covert action operations. NSA’s initial intelligence collection effort was relatively small. Then, in response to White House demands that “special intelligence [i.e., SIGINT] assets be exploited more fully,” the agency sent a plan to Secretary of Defense McNamara in November 1961, calling for additional intercept positions to monitor Cuban communications. This required placing the newly commissioned NSA spy ship USS Oxford off the northern coast of Cuba and hiring a dozen anticommunist Cuban exiles to translate the intercepted message traffic. This plan and another, more expansive version submitted in February 1962 were quickly approved by Mc-Namara.17

  Juanita Morris Moody, chief of the Office of Non-Communist Nations (B1), had the responsibility of running SIGINT collection operations against Cuba. As a woman holding a senior management position, with no college degree or advanced technical background, she was a rarity in that era at NSA. Born in Morven, North Carolina, she attended Western Carolina College in 1942–1943 but never graduated. She left school in April 1943 and volunteered to join the war effort. Within a month, she found herself assigned to SSA at Arlington Hall Station as a code clerk. While waiting for her security clearance to come through, she took a number of unclassified courses in cryptanalysis, in which she demonstrated her flair for code breaking, and she subsequently excelled in breaking complex cipher systems, such as a high-level German one-time pad cipher system. By the end of the war, she had risen from code clerk to office head. At the urging of her supervisor, she decided to stay on with the ASA. In only three years, she advanced to the position of chief of operations for one of ASA’s most important operational units. In subsequent years, she headed a number of important operational units at NSA, including the division that specialized in the solution of Soviet manual cipher systems.18

  Much of NSA’s early effort against Cuba was driven by the intelligence requirements of the CIA, not only for its own analytic purposes but also to support Operation Mongoose.19For example, declassified documents show that the CIA’s Clandestine Service was anxious to detect dissension within the Castro regime or the Cuban populace through NSA’s monitoring of Cuban police and internal security force communications.20In February 1962, a small team of SIGINT analysts
belonging to ASA were sent to the CIA’s newly opened interrogation center at Opa-Locka, Florida, the Caribbean Admissions Center, to gather intelligence information needed to support the SIGINT effort against Cuba by interrogating Cuban refugees and defectors.21Then there were the requirements of the FBI, which in 1962 wanted NSA to send it copies of all Western Union telegrams between the United States and Cuba, particularly those that identified which U.S. companies were still doing business with Cuba or revealed the names of Americans traveling there illegally.22

  NSA began diverting collection resources from other targets in order to cover Cuba. By April 1962, the number of NSA radio intercept positions dedicated to copying Cuban radio traffic had increased from thirteen to thirty-five, and the number of intelligence analysts and reporters working on the Cuban mission at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade had risen to eighty-three personnel. The number of aerial SIGINT collection flights around Cuba was dramatically increased, and in February 1962 the USS Oxford made another visit to the international waters off Havana to monitor Cuban communications traffic. The presence of the Oxford, with its 116 U.S. Navy SIGINT operators, outside Havana harbor so infuriated the Cuban government that on February 22, 1962, Fidel Castro publicly charged that the Oxford had violated Cuban territorial waters, and he handed out to journalists grainy photos of the antenna-studded ship, which could be seen clearly as it cruised nearby.23

 

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