By 1968, NSA’s inventory of computers dwarfed the computing power of the rest of the U.S. government combined, with the exception of the somewhat smaller computer complex used by the nuclear weapons designers of the Atomic Energy Commission. NSA’s director, General Marshall Carter, boasted, “NSA had over 100 computers occupying almost 5 acres of floorspace.”8
I Get the Sense You Are Disappointed
But despite all of the new technology at NSA’s command, it was becoming increasingly difficult to produce against its primary targets. To NSA’s frustration, a new generation of computerized cipher machines were being introduced around the world, which taxed the ability of NSA’s cryptanalysts to the limit, making it even more difficult for NSA to produce meaningful intelligence. As this increasingly worrisome decline continued, senior U.S. intelligence officials began to question whether SIGINT was worth all of the time, effort, and money allotted to it. The greatest problem was that twenty years after the end of World War II, NSA still could not read high-level enciphered Russian traffic. By 1965, there was a widespread belief within the U.S. intelligence community that the decline in NSA’s intelligence production had reached worrisome proportions, with a declassified CIA memo admitting that “SIGINT, striving for breakthroughs, is struggling against the growing security barriers that increasingly prevent readout of wanted information from signals.”9
A special unit called A5 was created in 1961 to mount an all-out assault on Soviet codes, headed by one of NSA’s best cryptanalysts, William Lutwiniak, who in his spare time was also the editor of the Washington Post crossword puzzle. He had been hired by the legendary William Friedman in February 1941 and worked on Japanese codes during the war. After that, he turned his attention to Russian ciphers, including some groundbreaking work on the solution of the Venona material. He would head A5 for the next twelve years. Unfortunately, he came in at a time when the hugely expensive cryptanalytic effort against Russian high-level ciphers remained stalled, with only one Soviet high-grade cipher machine system then being partially readable. According to a confidential source, the two Russian cipher machine systems that NSA was partially exploiting at the time—Silver and Mercury— yielded a trickle of intelligence rather than a flood.
Concerned about the declining value of NSA’s cryptanalytic product, and in partic u lar the agency’s lack of progress against Soviet cipher systems, in 1965 the CIA asked the former chief of the agency’s Clandestine Ser vice, Richard “Dick” Bissell, to take a long, hard look at NSA’s cryptanalytic efforts. Working largely by himself, Dick Bissell examined the long-term prospects for success against Soviet cipher systems. Bissell concluded that there should be no reduction in NSA’s overall cryptanalytic effort, but recommended that many of the NSA personnel then working on Soviet systems might be better employed working on the ciphers of “softer” non-Soviet targets.10
This meant that NSA’s most productive sources during the 1960s remained low-level signals sources that still had to be harvested and analyzed en masse in order to derive even a modicum of useful intelligence. For example, NSA was able to locate a few Soviet ICBM launch sites and missile test and production facilities by carefully monitoring the flight activity of special transport aircraft belonging to a number of special Soviet air force transport units based in and around Moscow whose function was to transport senior military officials and scientists and engineers involved in the missile program throughout the country.11In a similar vein, virtually all of the intelligence that NSA was producing in the 1950s and early 1960s concerning Soviet nuclear weapons testing activities was based almost entirely on intercepts of low-level radio traffic relating to special transport aircraft flight activity and weather reporting relating to Russian nuclear weapons tests, as well as exploiting the unencrypted communications traffic of the Soviet nuclear test detection system.12
But declassified documents show that it was becoming increasingly difficult for NSA to get at these low-level targets because beginning in the early 1960s, the Russians moved important chunks of their telephone and telegraph traffic to new telecommunications systems which the agency could not intercept, such as buried coaxial cable links and micro wave radio-relay systems. According to former senior CIA official Albert Wheelon, by 1963 “communications intelligence against the USSR was helpful but eroding as the Soviets moved their traffic to landlines and microwave links.” This meant that NSA’s collection specialists spent the entire decade of the 1960s trying as best they could to“reestablish COMINT access to Soviet and Chinese communications traffic.”13
Pat’s House
In April 1965, Lieutenant General Gordon Blake retired and was replaced as NSA’s director by his 1931 West Point classmate Lieutenant General Marshall “Pat” Carter, who was to become one of the most important men ever to head the agency, for better and for worse.
Carter served in a variety of antiaircraft artillery postings in the United States, Hawaii, and Panama before the army recognized his considerable intellect and sent him to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he graduated in 1936. From 1946 to 1947, he was the executive assistant to General George Marshall when the latter served as Truman’s special envoy to China. To everyone’s surprise, the taciturn Marshall and the jovial bon vivant Carter got along so well that when Marshall was named secretary of state in January 1947, he asked the Pentagon if he could keep Carter on as his assistant. After graduating from the National War College in June 1950, Carter moved over to the Pentagon to return to his old job as executive assistant to Marshall, who was now the secretary of defense. From that point onward, Carter served in a number of significant command positions. In March 1962, President Kennedy named him the deputy director of the CIA despite the fact that he had no prior intelligence experience. The job came with a promotion to the rank of lieutenant general. At the CIA, he was intimately involved in Operation Mongoose, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, which brought him into close contact with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and their cabinet members on a daily basis. Carter remained at the CIA until he was named director of NSA.14
Bald and pudgy, and not particularly imposing, Carter was bright, shrewd, and an extremely capable administrator, which, coupled with his lengthy exposure to high-level policy making in Washington, made him formidable. He also had a wicked sense of humor that was infamous throughout Washington.
When the aloof CIA director John McCone sealed up the connecting door to Carter’s adjacent office at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters in the dead of night, Carter affixed a fake hand to the wall where the door used to be, a less than subtle way of making fun of McCone’s action, but also leaving Carter’s visitors to wonder if McCone was trying to get out of his office. When McCone asked that perfumes and special toilet paper be placed in his private bathroom at Langley to accommodate the needs of his new wife, Carter responded by installing a container in his private bathroom to hold, among other things, a selection of corncob pipes and a well-worn copy of the Sears catalog.15
Despite the fact that he had never before commanded anything as large or complex as NSA, in a matter of months Carter began transforming the agency to fit his own personal vision, and he launched an intensive lobbying campaign to promote NSA within the U.S. intelligence community. This instantly brought him into conflict with senior officials at the CIA, who were inherently fearful of NSA’s growing power within the community, and with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s Pentagon, which wanted a docile agency that would do as it was told. Rather than bend or compromise, Carter, as a declassified NSA history puts it, “fell on a startled national defense community like a bobcat on the back of a moose.”16
The years 1965 through 1969 were marked by a never-ending series of brawls that pitted Carter and NSA against virtually everybody else in official Washington. In short order, the director managed to alienate McNamara, the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, and most of the other senior military commanders, which “poisoned the atmo
sphere and led to a confrontational relationship between NSA and the military it was sworn to support.” To many of his subordinates, it seemed as if Carter was deliberately picking fights with anyone who stood in his way.17
If anything, NSA’s relationship with the U.S. intelligence community was worse. As the agency’s influence inside the Johnson White House increased, so too did fear and resentment within the intelligence community. In a series of running battles, the CIA charged that NSA was producing finished intelligence in violation of NSC guidelines; that NSA deliberately sat on intelligence that the CIA needed so that it could look good with the White House; that the analysts at Fort Meade were not getting material to the intelligence community fast enough; and that NSA was flouting the authority of the director of central intelligence to manage the entire U.S. intelligence community.18
The Six-Day War and the Attack on the USS Liberty
Well before the start of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, NSA listening posts around the Middle East detected a substantial increase in Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Israeli military activity along the first three countries’ borders with Israel, including troop and equipment concentrations, intensified military exercises, and increased Israeli reconnaissance overflights of the other countries. The Naval Security Group (NSG) listening post in Morocco also picked up clear indications of impending hostilities from its intercepts of Egyptian military radio traffic.19
On April 7, 1967, a border clash between Israeli and Syrian troops in the Golan Heights escalated into a pitched battle, with the Israeli air force conducting dozens of air strikes on Syrian military positions deep inside Syria. This prompted NSA to declare a SIGINT Readiness Alfa alert for all Middle East targets. The alert was terminated three days later after the fighting ceased.20
But the situation in the region continued to deteriorate. On April 22, NSA intercepted radio traffic revealed that Egyptian TU-16 Badger bombers were dropping mustard gas bombs on Yemeni royalist positions in North Yemen. Between May 11 and May 14, the bombers struck a number of towns in southern Saudi Arabia, prompting NSA to increase its SIGINT coverage of Egyp-tian military activity in Yemen because of the threat it posed to America’s ally in the region, Saudi Arabia.21
More ominously, NSA intercepted and decrypted a message sent on May 13 by the Egyptian ambassador in Moscow to Cairo that, according to a CIA report, stated “Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Semenov had told the Egyptians that Israel was preparing a ground and air attack on Syria—to be carried out between 17 and 21 May. It stated that the Soviets had advised the UAR [United Arab Republic] to be prepared, to stay calm, and not to be drawn into fighting with Israel.” The Russian warning was totally wrong, but it gave Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser an excuse to ratchet up the tension level, with a CIA report dryly noting, “The Arabs were to take the information but not the advice.” 22 The next day, radio intercepts arriving at NSA confirmed that the Egyptians had just placed their entire air defense force on alert and sortied a number of warships out to sea. With this move, NSA extended its SIGINT alert to all Middle Eastern targets.23
Nasser’s intentions were clearly indicated by his demand, on May 19, for the removal of all U.N. peacekeeping forces in the Sinai Peninsula, which had been in place since the end of the 1956 Arab-Israeli War. After the United Nations withdrew, fifty thousand Egyptian troops along with five hundred tanks streamed across the Suez Canal. SIGINT reporting from the U.S. Air Force listening post at Iráklion, on the island of Crete, showed that the majority of the Egyptian armored and infantry units in the Sinai were now deployed from east to west between the city of Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, and the town of El-Arish, on the north coast of the Sinai.24On May 22, Egyptian naval forces imposed a blockade on the Strait of Tiran and closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping, prompting the full-scale mobilization of the Israeli Defense Forces. NSA SIGINT revealed that an Egyptian coastal artillery unit had taken up positions at Sharm al-Sheikh, at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, and that Egyptian torpedo boats were now patrolling the Strait of Tiran, giving the Egyptians the means to attack any ship attempting to sail to the Israeli port of Eilat. The following day, the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence (OCI) formed a Middle East task force in order to monitor the increasingly tense situation in the region, and on May 23, NSA raised its alert status to SIGINT Readiness Bravo Crayon for all Middle East targets, its highest non-wartime alert readiness level.25All NSA-controlled listening posts capable of Middle East intercepts were ordered to intensify coverage of military targets in the region, especially the U.S. Army’s huge listening post outside Asmara, Ethiopia, known as Kag-new Station; the U.S. Air Force intercept station at Iráklion; and the U.S. Navy listening posts at Yerolakkos on Cyprus, Sidi Yahia in Morocco, and Rota, Spain. NSA also had a few small clandestine listening posts hidden inside U.S. embassies in places like Beirut, which were operated by ASA through an intensely secretive 337-man unit whose oblique cover name was the U.S. Army Communications Support Unit. NSA feared that in the event of war, Egypt and its Arab allies would break diplomatic relations and force the closure of the embassies, shutting down those listening posts. Accordingly, on May 23, NSA ordered the U.S. Navy SIGINT ship USS Liberty to sail for the eastern Mediterranean at top speed.26
Until its arrival, only a few U.S. Air Force and Navy reconnaissance aircraft equipped for SIGINT collection, based outside Athens, were available for close-up monitoring of the situation, so they were given daily missions off the coast of the Sinai to collect increased intercepts of very high frequency (VHF) and ultrahigh frequency (UHF) Arab and Israeli military radio traffic. These missions yielded full confirmation that Arab and Israeli military forces were on a state of high alert.27
During the first weeks of June, radio intercepts revealed that Egyptian antiaircraft batteries deployed around Sharm al-Sheikh had opened fire on Israeli Mirage fighters patrolling the area. COMINT also showed that Egyptian air force aircraft were conducting aerial reconnaissance missions along the border with Israel, and that Egyptian navy torpedo boats had intensified their patrolling activities in the Strait of Tiran.28By June 3, COMINT revealed that Egyptian transport aircraft had flown several elite commando battalions to Jordan.29
Intercepts by NSA and Great Britain’s GCHQ of French diplomatic communications confirmed these and other developments at a time when the United States did not have diplomatic relations with Egypt (hence no firsthand intelligence reporting). The French ambassadors in Cairo and Tel Aviv were trying to broker a peaceful settlement between Egypt and Israel over the Sinai before it erupted in war. NSA was also intercepting and reading Soviet diplomatic radio traffic between Moscow and its military representatives in Cairo, which indicated that the Soviets believed that war between Israel and Egypt was imminent. In April, NSA issued a CRITIC warning after COMINT detected Russian military preparations for this eventuality.30
On Sunday morning, June 4, NSA decoded an intercept (whether from French or Israeli communications is still unknown), which revealed that the Israelis intended to attack Egypt within twenty-four hours. One of the very few U.S. government officials cleared for access to this material was a State Department intelligence analyst named Philip Merrill, who was the duty officer in the State Department INR unit that handled SIGINT. Merrill later recalled, “I checked this one morning and a certain word we were looking for, let’s just call it Geronimo, came in at 5:00 a.m. This was the jump-off word [ for the Israeli attack] and there was some limited associated material with it.” Merrill raced upstairs to Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s office, but Rusk was closeted in a meeting on the crisis with Secretary of Defense McNamara, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, and others. Of those attending, only Rusk, McNamara, and Rostow were cleared for access to the NSA material, so Rusk’s executive secretary devised a pretext for getting thosenot cleared out of the room so that Merrill could pass on the message. Merrill found it all somewhat amusing but says that it was “an indication for the record of history, how
tightly held much of this was.”31
Monday morning, June 5, started normally for the radio intercept operators at the U.S. Army’s huge Kagnew Station, in Ethiopia. At eight a.m. local time (two a.m. Washington time), operators were waiting to be relieved by the day shift when, a former army intercept supervisor recalled years later, one of the night shift’s French linguists announced that “some guy was screaming in French and there were clearly bombs exploding in the background. It turned out that the source of the commotion was a French reporter at the Cairo air-port, who was yelling into a telephone describing the bombing of the airport while Israeli bombs rained down around him.” The 1967 Arab-Israeli War had just begun.32
The majority of the four hundred combat aircraft belonging to the Israeli air force were busy destroying virtually all of the Egyptian air force’s airfields. A smaller number of Israeli fighter-bombers were at the same time attacking key military airfields in Jordan, Syria, and western Iraq. As a declassified NSA history notes, “by nightfall Israel had complete mastery of the sky having virtually destroyed four Arab air forces.”33
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