On Friday, October 26, NSA confirmed that all Soviet and Warsaw Pact ground and air forces in Eastern Europe and throughout the Euro pean portion of the Soviet Union had been placed on an increased state of alert. SIGINT also confirmed that some Soviet army units had suddenly left their barracks in East Germany and moved to concentration points closer to the border with West Germany; Soviet military exercises and training activity in East Germany had been stepped up; and even more Soviet tactical aircraft based in East Germany had been placed on five-minute-alert status. COMINT confirmed that an unknown number of ships and submarines from the Soviets’ North and Baltic Sea Fleets had hastily sortied from their home ports, and that Soviet naval units had stepped up their surveillance of the entrance to the Baltic Sea.90
As the level of tension and apprehension increased, NSA director Blake became increasingly concerned about the close proximity of the Oxford to the Cuban shoreline, which left the unarmed ship highly vulnerable to attack by Cuban or Russian forces if war broke out. The Cubans had vigorously complained to the U.N. Security Council about the Oxford’s continued presence off Havana.91At a ten a.m. meeting with President Kennedy on October 26, the question of what to do with the Oxford came up, and Secretary McNamara urged the president to pull the ship back so as to prevent a possible incident. He later noted, “The Navy was very much concerned about the vulnerability of this ship and the loss of security if its personnel were captured . . . It seemed wise to draw it out 20, 30 miles to take it out of range of capture, at least temporarily.”92The Oxford was ordered to pull back to a distance of thirty miles from the Cuban coastline until further notice.93
The Cuban Missile Crisis hit its peak on Saturday, October 27, which many NSA staffers remember as the scariest of the entire crisis, particularly for those at NSA headquarters, where the agency’s intelligence analysts knew how dire the situation really was. NSA official Harold Parish, who was then working on the Cuban problem, recalled, “The [Soviet] ships were getting close to the [quarantine] lines . . . It was a scary time for those of us who had a little bit of access to information which wasn’t generally available.”94 The news coming out of Fort Meade was ominous. NSA reported that its listening posts had detected the Cuban military mobilizing at a “high rate,” but that these forces remained “under orders not to take any hostile action unless attacked.” In East Germany, intercepted radio traffic showed that selected Russian combat units were continuing to increase their readiness levels, although no significant troop movements had been noted in SIGINT or other intelligence sources.95
Throughout Washington, there was heightened concern about the possibility of an armed incident taking place involving an American reconnaissance aircraft. On August 26 and 30, U-2 reconnaissance aircraft had accidentally penetrated Soviet airspace, the latter incident resulting in Russian MiGs scrambling to intercept the errant American plans. Then on September 8, a U-2 had been shot down by a Chinese SAM while over the mainland. Its Chinese Nationalist pilot was killed. 96
On the afternoon of October 27, everyone’s worst fears came true. At twelve noon, intercepts of Cuban radio traffic confirmed that a Soviet SA-2 SAM unit near Banes had shot down a U.S. Air Force U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. The U-2’s pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson Jr., had been killed instantly. At six p.m., the Joint Chiefs of Staff were told, “Intercept says the Cubans have recovered body and wreckage of the U-2.”97In April 1964, an analysis of traffic on that day suggested that the SAM site that brought down Anderson’s aircraft might have been manned by trigger-happy Cubans. But no definitive conclusion was ever reached.98
However, SIGINT confirmed that within hours of Anderson’s U-2 being shot down, the Soviets took over the entire Cuban air defense system lock, stock, and barrel. From that evening onward, only Russian-language commands, codes, call signs, and operating procedures were used on the air defense radio links.
Intercepts also showed that within forty-eight hours Russian air defense troops physically took over all of the SA-2 SAM sites in Cuba. The same thing happened to the Cuban air force, whose voices overnight disappeared from the airwaves and were replaced by those of Russian pilots flying more advanced MiG-21 fighters.99
On Sunday, October 28, fresh U-2 reconnaissance imagery showed that all twenty-four medium-range ballistic missile launchers in Cuba were now fully operational. And on the same day, NSA intercepted a number of messages from the Cuban Ministry of Armed Forces addressed to all Cuban air defense and antiaircraft units, reminding them to continue to obey an edict from October 23 “not to open fire unless attacked.” NSA also intercepted a radio transmission made by the head of the Las Villas province militia ordering that “close surveillance be maintained over militiamen and severe measures be taken with those who demonstrate lack of loyalty towards the present regime.” On the other side of the Atlantic, intercepted radio traffic showed that Soviet forces in East Germany remained in a state of “precautionary defensive readiness.” Intelligence from NSA’s Soviet Submarine Division at Fort Meade showed that the number of Soviet attack submarines at sea was higher than normal, but none were detected leaving Soviet home waters and heading for Cuba.100.CIA, memorandum,
Meanwhile, the Cubans struck back. On the night of October 28, saboteurs blew up four electrical substations in western Venezuela that were owned by the American oil company Creole Corporation, resulting in the temporary loss of one sixth of Venezuela’s daily oil production of three million barrels. The previous afternoon, an NSA listening post had intercepted a radio transmission from a clandestine transmitter located somewhere near Havana ordering a number of unknown addressees in South America to destroy “any kind of Yankee property.” The same directive was also broadcast on October 28 and 30. CIA analysts soberly concluded, “Further attempts at sabotage elsewhere in Latin America can be expected.” They were right. On October 29 in Santiago, Chile, a bomb that was meant to blow up the U.S. embassy exploded prematurely, killing the bomb maker.101
Conclusions
The bomb blasts marked, at least from NSA’s perspective, the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Despite the agency’s many important contributions, it is now clear that the crisis was in fact anything but an intelligence success story. Because NSA was unable to read high-level Soviet cipher systems, it was not able to give an advance warning of Soviet intentions before the first Soviet merchant ships carrying the missiles headed for Cuba. According to a former NSA intelligence analyst, the agency failed to detect the disappearance, in internal Soviet communications traffic, of the Fifty-first Rocket Division before it appeared in Cuba in October 1962. Moreover, NSA failed to detect the disappearance of five complete medium-range and intermediate-range missile regiments from their peacetime home bases inside the Soviet Union before they too were detected inside Cuba in October. The agency intercepted only one low-level Russian message that vaguely suggested that the Russians were thinking of deploying missiles to Cuba.102.
But most important of all, SIGINT did not pick up any indication whatsoever that the Russian ballistic missiles were in Cuba before they were detected by the CIA’s U-2 spy planes. A recently declassified NSA history concludes that the Cuban Missile Crisis “marked the most significant failure of SIGINT to warn national leaders since World War II.”103
CHAPTER 6
Errors of Fact and Judgment
SIGINT and the Gulf of Tonkin Incidents
Behold, how great a matter a little fire
kindleth.
—JAMES 3:5
The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Crisis is an important episode in the history of both NSA and the entire U.S. intelligence community because it demonstrated all too clearly two critical points that were to rear their ugly head again forty years later in the 2003 Iraqi weapons of mass destruction scandal. The first was that under intense political pressure, intelligence collectors and analysts will more often than not choose as a matter of political expediency not to send information to the White House that they know will piss off the president of the Uni
ted States. The second was that intelligence information, if put in the wrong hands, can all too easily be misused or misinterpreted if a system of analytic checks and balances are not in place and rigidly enforced.1
OPLAN 34A
Between 1958 and 1962, the CIA had sent a number of agents into North Vietnam. The first agents were assigned just to collect intelligence. Then, starting in 1960, teams of South Vietnamese agents trained by the CIA were infiltrated into North Vietnam to conduct sabotage as well as collect intelligence. With very few exceptions, these agent insertion operations were complete failures. The North Vietnamese security services captured the agents almost as soon as they arrived. Between 1961 and 1968, the CIA and the Defense Department lost 112 agents who were parachuted into North Vietnam, as well as a number of the C-54, C-123, and C-130 transport aircraft used to drop them. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s typically understated comment on the agent drop program was “Nothing came of any of it.”2
After this dismal performance, in July 1962 the management of all covert operations against North Vietnam was transferred from the CIA to the Defense Department. On January 1, 1963, control of the conduct of covert action operations inside North Vietnam was given to the U.S. Army’s super-secret clandestine intelligence unit in Vietnam, the Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observation Group (MACVSOG). Pursuant to a Top Secret operations plan designated OPLAN 34-63, put together by the staff of the Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), in Hawaii, U.S.-backed raids against the North Vietnamese coastline by South Vietnamese commandos commenced in the fall of 1963. But the results produced by these raids were disappointing, and in December 1963 MACVSOG went back to the drawing board and devised a new plan, OPLAN 34A, which included an even greater level of South Vietnamese participation and U.S. Navy support. In January 1964, the U.S. Navy set up a secret base in Da Nang to train South Vietnam -ese military personnel to conduct maritime commando raids against the North Vietnamese coastline with two PT boats provided by MACVSOG.3
Incredibly, virtually no one in NSA’s Office of Asian Nations (B2), which was responsible for monitoring developments in North Vietnam, was cleared for access to details of OPLAN 34A, including its head, Milton Zaslow. Years later, Zaslow would tell a group of NSA historians, “None of us had been cleared for 34A, and we did not know that there were actions underway.”4
But a few officials within NSA knew about OPLAN 34A and were tasked with secretly providing SIGINT support for the MACVSOG commando raids under the name Project Kit Kat. Inside South Vietnam, some 130 army, navy, and air force SIGINT operators were engaged full-time in monitoring North Vietnamese communications as part of Kit Kat, including a highly secretive unit at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, outside Saigon, called the Special Support Group, whose job was to feed SIGINT reporting concerning North Vietnamese reactions to the OPLAN 34A raids to MACVSOG headquarters in Saigon.5
In Washington a fierce debate was raging within the U.S. intelligence community about whether to release to the public information, including SIGINT, “demonstrating to the world the extent of control exercised by Hanoi over the Viet Cong in SVN [South Vietnam] and Pathet Lao forces in Laos.” The available intelligence showed that Hanoi was supplying and equipping the guerrillas both by sea and by the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But the U.S. intelligence community refused to even consider releasing any SIGINT, warning, “Should it become public knowledge that we are successfully exploiting North Vietnamese communications, not only the Vietnamese but the [Chinese] can be expected to take additional security measures.”6
Back in Southeast Asia, the second round of MACVSOG commando raids on the North Vietnamese coast was proving to be no more successful than the first round. During the spring of 1964, North Vietnamese security forces inflicted severe losses on the OPLAN 34A maritime commando forces and bagged the few remaining agents left in North Vietnam. Testifying in a closed session before the House Armed Services Committee, CIA director John McCone admitted that there had been “many disappointments with these operations with a number of teams rolled up” and that sabotage efforts had “not been too significant.”7
In fact, as a declassified NSA history reveals, these commando raids had only served to piss the North Vietnamese off and “raised Hanoi’s determination to meet them head on.” The volume of North Vietnamesenaval radio traffic went through the roof every time there was a commando raid, with the intercepts indicating a determination by the North Vietnamese to annihilate the attackers. But the pressure from Washington for quick results meant that the intelligence warnings of North Vietnamese resolve were ignored, and new, larger, and more aggressive commando raids were immediately planned for the summer. Looking back at these events, it is clear that both sides were charging rapidly toward an inevitable clash that would lead to war.8
In Harm’s Way
On July 3, 1964, the new commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, cabled Washington with his intelligence requirements in support of OPLAN 34A. Westmoreland urgently requested more intelligence collection regarding North Vietnamese coastal defense and naval forces, which had been plaguing the American-led 34A Special Operations Forces. Westmore-land also required details concerning North Vietnamese coastal radars that could detect and track the 34A patrol and speed boats operating along the North Vietnamese coast. In particu lar, intelligence coverage was requested for those areas in North Vietnam scheduled as targets for OPLAN 34A commando raids in July, specifically the area around the city of Vinh and the islands of Hon Me, Hon Nieu, and Hon Matt, further up the coast.9
The principal means available in the Far East at the time to gather this kind of intelligence was to use U.S. Navy destroyers carrying a SIGINT detachment and special radio intercept gear to slowly cruise off the enemy’s coastline ferreting out secrets. These secret destroyer reconnaissance patrols were known by the code name Desoto.10The first of these Desoto destroyer reconnaissance patrols was conducted off the coast of China in April 1962. By July 1964, the Navy had conducted sixteen Desoto patrols without serious incident, all but two of which were focused on the Soviet and Chinese coastlines.11
Responding to Westmoreland’s request, on July 10, Admiral Ulysses S.G. Sharp Jr., the newly appointed commander of CINCPAC in Hawaii, approved a destroyer reconnaissance patrol of the North Vietnamese coast and forwarded the request to the 303 Committee, the secret committee in Washington that then supervised all sensitive covert and clandestine intelligence activities conducted by the U.S. intelligence community. After a perfunctory review, the 303 Committee approved the patrol on July 15 and a host of other sensitive reconnaissance operations proposed for initiation in August, with the Desoto patrol getting under way no later than July 31, to determine the nature and extent of North Vietnam’s naval patrol activity along its coastline.12
On July 18, CINCPAC selected the destroyer USS Maddox (DD-731), then in port at Keelung, to conduct the August Desoto patrol off North Vietnam. The twenty-two-hundred-ton Maddox was a World War II–vintage Alan M. Sumner– class destroyer built in Bath, Maine, and commissioned on June 2, 1944. She served with distinction during World War II in the Pacific, taking a hit from a Japa nese kamikaze on January 21, 1945, which kept her out of action for two months. She served in support of U.N. forces during the Korean War and continued operating in various parts of the Pacific until 1974. She carried a crew of 336 officers and enlisted men, and her main armament were six twin-mounted five-inch guns and four twin-mounted three-inch antiaircraft guns mounted on raised platforms behind the rear smokestack, which had been added in the mid-1950s in place of her original complement of forty-millimeter and twenty-millimeter AA guns. The Maddox was chosen for the mission because her old torpedo tubes, which had taken up the entire 0-1 deck between the two smokestacks, had been removed in the 1950s and replaced by two antisubmarine “hedgehogs” located on either side of the bridge. This meant that the entire torpedo deck was free for modules that housed electronic surveillance equipment and the militar
y and NSA personnel who operated them, in what was known as a SIGINT COMVAN.13
The primary mission of the Maddox was to collect intelligence on North Vietnamesenaval forces, monitor North Vietnamese coastal radar stations, and try to ascertain whether junks based in North Vietnam were helping infiltrate supplies and equipment into South Vietnam. Only four officers on board were cleared for access to SIGINT: the task force commander, Captain John Herrick; the ship’s captain, Captain Herbert Ogier Jr.; Herrick’s flag lieutenant; and Ogier’s executive officer. All four officers were briefed in general terms about the OPLAN 34A commando operations then taking place against North Vietnam, but they were deliberately not told about the forthcoming 34A raids that would coincide with their mission. As with the John R. Craig’s patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin four months earlier, CINCPAC ordered that the destroyer come no closer than eight miles from the North Vietnamese coastline, but the Maddox was permitted to come within four miles of islands off the coast, which as it turned out were key targets of the forthcoming raids.14
Captain Norman Klar, the commander of the U.S. Navy SIGINT unit in Taiwan— Naval Security Group Activity, Taipei— gave Captains Herrick and Ogier, as well as their staff officers, a pre-mission intelligence briefing on the North Vietnamese order of battle. At the end of the briefing, Ogier asked Klar only one question: “Will my ship be attacked?” This, according to Klar’s memoirs, written years later, was his response: “I said ‘No.’ You are not the first DESOTO patrol in the Gulf. There has been absolutely no hostile action taken by the Vietnamese in the past, and I believe that will continue.” Klar went on to admit that his assessment turned out to be horribly incorrect, saying, “Talk about being wrong!”15
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