Around three a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) NSA placed all of its units in the Middle East on SIGINT Readiness Alfa, and some of them intercepted the following Egyptian radio message: “Cairo has just been informed at least five of its airfields in Sinai and the Canal area have suddenly become unser-viceable.” Less than an hour later, the NSA listening post at Iráklion intercepted a Jordanian air force message indicating that a number of its airfields were also being attacked by Israeli fighter-bombers.34
National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, reading forwarded raw transcripts of these intercepts in the White House Situation Room (the first reached him shortly after nine a.m.), phoned President Johnson with summaries as soon as they came in. The SIGINT reporting convinced Rostow and Johnson that the Israelis had just launched a massive first strike against the opposing Arab air forces. By midafternoon, it was clear that the Israelis had almost completely wiped out the Egyptian and Jordanian air forces, leading Rostow to send a memo to Johnson later that afternoon titled “The first day’s Turkey Shoot.”35
Chaos within the Egyptian military command structure, as reflected in the COMINT intercepts, was so pervasive that Egyptian military communications personnel stopped enciphering their communications and talked in the clear, giving an unexpected gift to American, British, and Israeli radio intelligence personnel.36SIGINT during the war also revealed that Iraq, which had promised to provide the Syrians fighting the Israelis in the Golan Heights with a full combat division, had in fact not moved any units toward its border with Syria.37
Beginning on June 6, the day after the Israeli offensive began, and continuing for the next three weeks, NSA listening posts in Europe and the Middle East monitored over 350 flights of Russian military transport aircraft from the Soviet Union to Syria and Egypt carry ing military equipment and supplies.38
But the Russian shipments were all for naught. By the end of June 7, virtually all the Egyptian army units in the Sinai had been destroyed, and the survivors were fleeing back to Egypt as fast as they could. Robert Wilson, an Arabic linguist on the NSA spy ship the Liberty, which had finally arrived off the north coast of the Sinai on June 7, recalled, “Once we got on station, the Egyptians were dead, practically. There was no voice communications at all that we could pick up, except for the Israelis.” Unfortunately, as recently declassified NSA material reveals, the Liberty had sailed without any Hebrew linguists aboard, since NSA had not tasked it to intercept Israeli communications before it sailed.39
SIGINT was able to show that the Egyptian general staff was desperately trying to extricate what was left of its decimated forces from the Sinai. By the end of June 8, NSA analysts knew that the war was for all intents and purposes over, having intercepted a message from the commander of Israeli forces in the Sinai telling Tel Aviv that his forces were “camping on the banks of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea.”40
But that afternoon, Israeli fighter-bombers and motor torpedo boats attacked the Liberty as it sailed in international waters off the north coast of the Sinai. The attack killed 34 members of the ship’s crew, including 25 navy, marine, and NSA civilian cryptologists in its research spaces, and wounded a further 171 crew members. This incident represents the single worst loss of SIGINT personnel in NSA’s history, something for which, understandably, many former NSA personnel and most crewmen who were on the Liberty have never forgiven the Israelis. 41
While the Liberty was unable to read the communications in Hebrew of the attacking Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats, a U.S. Navy EC-121M SIGINT aircraft flying out of its base in Greece was able to intercept the radio traffic between Israeli helicopter pilots scouting the ship and their ground controller at Hatzor Air Base, near Tel Aviv, shortly after the attacks took place.42These intercepts confirmed that Israeli forces had attacked the Liberty, and that the Israelis had failed to identify it as an American ship before or during the attack. One intercept caught the pilot of one of the Israeli helicopters radioing that the attacked ship was “definitely Egyptian.”43
Thirty years later, a raging controversy continues to swirl around the Israeli attack on the Liberty. The Israeli government admitted that its forces had attacked the ship, but claimed that it had been an accident. Although the U.S. government accepted the Israeli government’s finding and reparation payment, this explanation was rejected by most of the Liberty’s surviving crew members, who wonder how the Israeli fighter pilots and torpedo boat captains who attacked the ship could not have noticed the huge American flag flying from the ship’s masthead. Former NSA officials and Liberty crew members have, more recently, alleged that NSA is withholding from the public transcripts of intercepted Israeli communications that allegedly show that the Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship. But current NSA officials deny this claim, although they acknowledge that NSA continues to withhold from public release a number of documents relating to the attack, for reasons as yet unknown.
In the days after the attack on the Liberty, the Israeli military captured the Golan Heights and threatened to extend its advance toward the Syrian capital of Damascus. But the Russians were not about to let Syria be humiliated in the same way as its Egyptian ally. At eight forty-eight a.m. on Saturday, June 10, the Washington-Moscow Hot Line teletype machine in the White House Situation Room printed out a message from Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin for President Johnson, one of the most ominous ever transmitted via this communications link. It read, in part, “A very crucial moment has now arrived which forces us, if military actions are not stopped in the next few hours, to adopt an in de-pen dent decision. We are ready to do this. However, these actions may bring us into a clash, which will lead to a grave catastrophe . . . We propose to warn Israel that, if this is not fulfilled, necessary actions will be taken, including military.” In other words, if the Israeli military’s advance on Damascus was not stopped immediately, the Soviets would intervene militarily. Kosygin’s threat set off alarm bells all over Washington. CIA director Richard Helms, who was in the Cabinet Room at the White House when Kosygin’s message was delivered, recalled, “The atmosphere was tense. The conversation was conducted in the lowest voices I have ever heard.” The entire U.S. intelligence community was immediately placed on alert, with NSA’s director of operations, Oliver Kirby, declaring a SIGINT Readiness Bravo Crayon alert for all Soviet communications targets.44
Shortly after Kosygin’s message, SIGINT revealed that a number of Soviet airborne divisions and their associated military transport aircraft had been placed on alert inside the Soviet Union. SIGINT also confirmed that at least some of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces had been placed on alert. A month later, in July, SIGINT detected the largest integrated exercise of Soviet strategic nuclear forces ever witnessed by the U.S. intelligence community. Not only were all units of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF) tested in a series of high-level command post and communications exercises, but the Russians sor-tied an unusually high number of submarines from their home bases and even sent a portion of Russia’s small strategic bomber force to conduct simulated nuclear strikes on American targets from their Arctic staging bases. To put it mildly, the unannounced exercise caused a fair amount of apprehension in Washington.45
Fortunately for all concerned, the Israeli army stopped its advance into Syria, and the Israeli government accepted an immediate U.N.-sponsored ceasefire. The war officially came to an end at six thirty p.m. on June 10, 1967, and everyone in the U.S. intelligence community breathed a deep sigh of relief.
The USS Pueblo
In February 1965, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet recommended to the chief of naval operations that the navy acquire at least one dedicated spy ship of its own to perform the kinds of SIGINT collection missions that NSA’s Liberty-class spy ships were doing. The navy was frustrated that NSA’s fleet of “Technical Research Ships” such as the USS Liberty were oriented exclusively toward national SIGINT targets, making them next to useless for gathering the kind of tactical intelligence on Soviet naval
activities that the navy wanted but that NSA tended to ignore. So in 1965, the navy approved the conversion of not one but three naval vessels into intelligence collection ships, designated AGERs, which would collect intelligence solely for navy commanders. NSA very reluctantly agreed to allow this, because of fears that the navy had far more ambitious objectives than the ones it cited as grounds for carrying out its own sea-based SIGINT operations.46
The navy selected three mothballed World War II–era cargo ships (AKs). The first was the USS Banner, a light cargo ship (AKL-25), chosen in July 1965 because it was “the least unsuitable hull that could be made immediately available.” Seven weeks and $1.5 million later, the conversion was complete. Eight SIGINT antennae were bolted to the ship’s superstructure and masthead; below the main deck just forward of the pilothouse, a SIGINT operations center nicknamed the Sod Hut (where a twenty-seven-man SIGINT detachment was to work) was added. It was small and extremely cramped, measur ing only about thirty feet in length and eleven feet in width, and was configured with five SIGINT intercept positions and a separate communications position, which was less than one quarter the number of intercept positions on NSA’s much larger Liberty-class spy ships.47
As soon as the conversion was completed, the Banner sailed to her new home port in Yokosuka, Japan, without undertaking any sea trials; arriving in Japan on October 17, she commenced her first operational patrol on October 30. Over the next two years, the Banner provided valuable SIGINT about Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean fleet activities and antisubmarine warfare techniques.48
In November 1965, the navy was authorized to modify two more ships into AGER intelligence collection vessels. These ships were the USS Pueblo and the USS Palm Beach. On April 12, 1966, the Pueblo was reactivated and taken to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, where it was converted into an AGER between June 1966 and September 1967 at a cost of $4.5 million. The Pueblo departed Bremerton, Washington, in September, and, after a brief shakedown cruise off San Diego, sailed for Japan, arriving at the port of Yoko-suka on December 1. She sailed from the port of Sasebo, Japan, on her maiden voyage on January 11, 1968, on what was supposed to be a routine three-and-a-half-week intelligence collection mission off the east coast of North Korea.49 Twelve days later, on January 23, the Pueblo was attacked and seized by North Korean warships in international waters twenty-five miles off the North Korean port of Wonsan. One crewman, Duane Hodges, was killed during the attack. 50
Weeks before the Pueblo sailed, on December 23, 1967, NSA had sent out a message to the U.S. intelligence community warning about the possibility that the spy ship might be attacked by an increasingly belligerent North Korea and suggesting that “ship protective measures”— i.e., air cover and/or a naval escort— be seriously considered. But a congressional investigation after the ship’s seizure found that the NSA message “never reached responsible authorities” and observed that “the incredible handling of the NSA warning message on the Pueblo mission is hardly looked upon with pride by responsible authorities in the Pentagon.” On January 2, 1968, nine days before the Pueblo sailed into history, the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence wrote a memo to CIA director Helms also warning that the North Koreans “might choose to take some sort of action against these ships.”51
Intercepts of North Korean naval radio traffic indicated that the North Koreans were well aware of the Pueblo’s presence off their coast at least twenty-four hours before the attack, suggesting to American intelligence analysts that the attack was premeditated.52NSG listening posts in Japan intercepted radio transmissions from the North Korean warships during the attack that showed that the ship was in international waters when she was seized, although intercepted North Korean radar tracking transmissions reportedly indicated that she had violated North Korean territorial waters.53
The damage to U.S. national security caused by the capture of the Pueblo was massive and, in most respects, irreparable. An NSA history notes, “It was everyone’s worst nightmare, surpassing in damage anything that had ever happened to the cryptologic community.”54
The problem was that the U.S. government could not admit this because, at the time, the Johnson administration was still sticking to the cover story that the Pueblo was an “oceanographic research ship” engaged in routine scientific research. NSA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community initially believed that the ship’s crew had managed to destroy all of the classified documents and equipment on the ship before it was boarded by the North Koreans. Then a few days later, NSA was stunned when it received word that North Korean state tele -vision had just broadcast photographs of a large number of Top Secret Codeword documents that had been captured on the Pueblo, including the titles of the documents. A few months later, the North Koreans published a book in French that included photographs and the full text of many of the same NSA documents (some of which the agency still holds to be classified), demonstrating what the Pueblo’s true mission was.55
Then, to make matters even worse, on January 27, 1968, four days after the Pueblo was seized, NSA intercepted the radio transmissions of a Vladivostok-based Russian navy AN-12 military transport plane as it landed at the military airfield serving the port of Wonsan. American intelligence analysts were forced to assume the worst case—that Russian experts had flown in and been allowed to examine the Pueblo’s SIGINT spaces and captured documents. Shortly afterward, a U.S. Air Force listening post in northern Japan, which was monitoring the Pyongyang-to-Moscow facsimile link, detected that many of the classified documents captured on the Pueblo were being sent to Moscow.56
In the months that followed, several important SIGINT sources that NSA had been successfully exploiting in the Soviet Union and North Korea dried up without any warning. The loss of these sources made the disaster complete. A January 24 Top Secret Codeword cable from the director of NSA admitted that the capture of the ship was “a major intelligence coup without parallel in modern history.” According to the report, the damage to U.S. SIGINT collection operations was deemed to be “very severe.”57
The White House, the Pentagon, senior U.S. military officers, and even the CIA and NSA all concluded that the mission had been not only dangerous but also unnecessary. When asked by an army interviewer years later whether the Pueblo mission had been worth the risk, the commander of U.S. military forces in Korea at the time, General Charles Bonesteel III, said, “No . . . the degree of risk was totally unnecessary. Now, I wanted intelligence. I didn’t have any damned intelligence, real intelligence that could provide early warnings against a surprise attack from the North. But we didn’t need it in superfluous COMINT. This was the intelligence tail wagging the dog.”58
The Invasion of Czechoslovakia
SIGINT proved to be valuable and effective in covering the Soviet military buildup for the invasion of Czechoslovak i a that began on August 20, 1968. The purpose of the Soviet invasion was to topple the Czech government headed by a progressive-minded Communist Party official named Alexander Dubc?ek. Immediately upon being elected in April 1968, Dubc?ek earned the ire of Moscow by firing all of the hard-line Communists from the Czech government, then instituting a series of pop ular political and social reforms that caused even more consternation in Moscow.
Within days of Dubc?ek taking power, SIGINT detected the movement of eight Soviet combat divisions from their barracks in East Germany, Poland, and the western military districts of the Soviet Union to points around the periphery of Czechoslo vakia. By the end of June, SIGINT and satellite reconnaissance revealed that the Soviets now had thirty-four combat divisions deployed along the Czech border, and that the Soviets were rapidly moving hundreds of combat aircraft to airfields within striking distance of targets inside Czechoslo vakia. On July 17, SIGINT detected the first signs that the Soviet military had begun mobilizing its forces in the western USSR for a potential invasion of Czech oslo vakia. Three days later NSA reported that a newly activated high-level Soviet headquarters was now operating inside the Soviet military bunker co
mplex at Legnica in southern Poland. On August 3 and 4, NSA listening posts detected the movement of large numbers of Soviet, East German, and Polish troops to the Czech border, and further large-scale troop movements were detected within the Soviet Baltic and Belorussian Military Districts toward the Polish and Czech borders.59 But sadly, despite the numerous indicators turning up in SIGINT and from other intelligence sources, the CIA’s intelligence analysts at Langley stuck by their judgment that the Soviets would not intervene militarily in Czech oslovaki a until after a special meeting of the Czech Communist Party scheduled for September 9, 1968. As it turned out, the Kremlin had already decided that they had to intervene before the Czech Party Congress meeting for fear that the gathering of Czech officials might conceivably endorse a stronger anti-Soviet political platform than that already advocated by the Dubc?ek government.
The best potential source available to the U.S. intelligence community as to whether the Soviets intended to invade Czechoslo vaki a came from the super-secret joint CIA-NSA listening post located on the tenth floor of the American embassy in Moscow that had been intercepting the telephone calls of key Politburo members since at least the early 1960s. There was also a separate intercept operation hidden inside the British embassy in Moscow. Both sites monitored a wide range of radio and telephone communications inside the Russian capital, including KGB, GRU, Soviet government, and police radio messages, as well as the car phone conversations of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and his successors.60
Despite the public disclosure of the Moscow embassy SIGINT operation by the New York Times in 1966, the Russian leaders continued to talk away on their car phones in the years that followed, and the CIA and NSA continued to tape and translate them as fast as they came in. The highly sensitive intelligence reports derived from these intercepts, code-named Gamma Guppy, were deemed to be so secret that they were distributed to a very select few in the entire U.S. government. But Gamma Guppy proved not to be a definitive source on the question of Czech oslo vakia. According to Ambassador David Fischer, who in 1968 was a senior intelligence analyst at the State Department:
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