We had an interesting system called Guppy. Guppy was very compartmentalized special intelligence. It was basically intercepts of the mobile phone lines of the Russian leadership in Moscow. The reason I tell this story is that on the eve of the invasion of Czech o slovak i a, the then head of the Warsaw Pact, Marshal [Andrei Antonovich] Grechko, had gone around to all the Warsaw Pact members to canvas them whether or not they were going to invade. And when he arrived back at Moscow airport, we were able to intercept a telephone call Grechko made to Brezhnev. The problem was they were no fools and spoke in a word code—you know, the moon is red or some silly phrase—and we didn’t have the faintest idea whether that meant the invasion was on or off.61
Back in Washington, an accumulation of new SIGINT convinced NSA intelligence analysts that the Soviets intended to invade Czech oslo vaki a. On August 19, NSA issued an alert message to the entire U.S. intelligence community that warned that all signs appearing in intercepted Soviet radio traffic indicated that the Russians were about to invade Czechoslovakia. Later that morning, NSA official David McManis, who was serving at the time as the deputy chief of the White House Situation Room, sent a brief note to National Security Advisor Rostow, telling him that “the invasion they both thought would happen appeared to be imminent.”62
The warnings out of NSA proved to be correct. A few hours later, shortly after midnight on the morning of August 20, a fresh batch of intercepts re-vealed that fifteen to sixteen Soviet combat divisions and supporting Warsaw Pact forces had crossed the border into Czechoslovak ia. In a matter of hours they had occupied most of the largest cities and almost all key government military installations inside Czechoslovakia.63
The October Surprise
One of the great secrets of the Vietnam War era was that some of NSA’s best SIGINT product came from the agency’s ability to read virtually all of the high-level military and diplomatic traffic of the government of South Vietnam as early as the October 1963 coup d’état that overthrew South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem.64
NSA’s intelligence continued to improve as the Vietnam War intensified, largely because NSA had supplied all of the South Vietnamese government’s communications and encryption equipment to begin with. The most important SIGINT materials coming out of NSA were decrypts of the cable traffic between South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu and his ambassador in Washington, Bui Diem, which covered the full gamut of U.S.–South Vietnamese relations. By the fall of 1968, these NSA decrypts were deemed to be so sensitive that they were placed in a separate reporting compartment designated Gamma Gout, which limited access to only a select few officials in Washington. Thanks to the NSA decrypts, President Johnson knew virtually everything about the South Vietnamese government’s attitudes toward the Paris peace talks with the North Vietnamese, as well as President Thieu’s negotiating positions.65
It was no secret that an unwilling and angry Thieu felt that Johnson had forced his government to participate in the Paris talks. But Thieu knew that since Johnson was not running for reelection, Thieu stood a pretty good chance of being able to abandon the talks, depending on who won the election in November— the Democrat Hubert Humphrey or the Republican Party’s candidate, Richard Nixon.
A little more than a week before the U.S. presidential election, between October 23 and 27, NSA intercepted several “eyes only” messages from Diem to Thieu. Senior members of the Nixon entourage, Diem reported, including longtime Republican political activist Anna Chennault, who was the vice chair of the Republican National Finance Committee, had asked that Thieustand firm until after the election, when a Republican administration could offer the South Vietnamese government more favorable terms than an administration headed by Humphrey. The Nixon campaign didn’t want Thieu to do anything that might help Humphrey get elected, so Nixon wanted Thieu to stall the Paris peace talks by not attending until after the election.66
One of Johnson’s senior aides, Arthur Krim, recalled in an interview, “The President told me very much off the record . . . they had this cable that Madame [Anna] Chennault had sent I guess it was [Nguyen Van] Thieu or somebody in South Vietnam saying, ‘Don’t cooperate in Paris. It will be helpful to Humphrey.’ I’m not giving you the words, but the gist was wait for Nixon.”67
The substance of these NSA decrypts was repeatedly confirmed by taps placed in Thieu’s office in Saigon by the CIA, which gave the CIA station in Saigon unparalleled access to Thieu’s thinking and the machinations of the South Vietnamese government in general.68An October 26 CIA memo to National Security Advisor Rostow contained a bombshell derived from the taps: “Thieu sees a definite connection between the moves now underway and President Johnson’s wish to see Vice President Humphrey elected. Thieu referred many times to the U.S. elections and suggested to his visitors that the current talks are designed to aid Humphrey’s candidacy. Thieu has said that Johnson and Humphrey will be replaced and then Nixon could change the U.S. position.” 69
On October 29, a week before Election Day, Rostow wrote a memo to Johnson that began, “I have been considering the explosive possibilities of the information that we now have on how certain Republicans may have inflamed the South Vietnamese to behave as they have been behaving. There is no evidence that Mr. Nixon himself is involved . . . Beyond that, the materials are so explosive that they could gravely damage the country whether Mr. Nixon is elected or not. If they get out in their present form, they could be the subject of one of the most acrimonious debates we have ever witnessed.”70
In late October, Johnson ordered FBI assistant director Cartha “Deke” De-Loach to immediately place Anna Chennault under surveillance and put wiretaps on all of the telephone lines servicing the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington. DeLoach recalls that he asked Johnson, “Mr. President, please call the Attorney General and instruct him to tell us to do this.” Shortly thereafter, Attorney General Ramsey Clark instructed the FBI to wiretap the South Vietnamese embassy. According to DeLoach, the taps picked up no firm evidence that American political figures were trying to influence South Vietnamese politics. 71
But in the end, Thieu followed the advice he had gotten from Chennault. On November 2, he reneged on his agreement to sit down in Paris at the same table with the Viet Cong, dashing Johnson’s hopes of negotiating a last-minute deal.
For reasons not yet known, Johnson chosenot to publicly divulge what Nixon’s supporters had done, perhaps because he knew that revealing it would cause political carnage in Washington. Even if he had disclosed the material, it probably would not have helped. Three days later, on November 5, Humphrey was decisively defeated, and on January 20, 1969, Richard Nixon became the new president of the United States.
CHAPTER 9
Tragedy and Triumph
NSA During the Nixon, Ford, and
Carter Administrations
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
—JOHN 1:5
The Post-Vietnam Blues
On the day that Richard Nixon was sworn in as the president of the United States, January 20, 1969, NSA was a billion-dollar colossus, consisting of a staggering 93,067 military and civilian personnel in the United States and seventeen foreign countries. This meant that NSA accounted for 62 percent of the 153,800 military and civilian personnel then engaged in intelligence activities for the Defense Department.1
The six years of the Nixon presidency (1969–1974) were anything but a happy time for NSA. As America’s involvement in the Vietnam War wound down, the U.S. intelligence community’s resources were dramatically slashed. It lost 40 percent of its budget and 50 percent of its people. NSA fared worst of all. Its bud get was cut by one third and its manpower fell from 95,000 military and civilian employees in 1969 (19,300 of whom worked at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade) to approximately 50,000 by 1980, of whom 16,500 worked at Fort Meade.2The cohesion and discipline of the agency’s draftee military personnel deteriorated rapidly. Marijuana usage among military SIGINT personne
l increased dramatically. Courts-martial and other forms of disciplinary action involving SIGINT personnel rose dramatically, as did desertion and AWOL rates. Radio intercept operators staged work slowdowns to protest American military operations in Southeast Asia, and NSA personnel even participated in antiwar protests at home against the Vietnam War.3The result, according to an NSA historian, was “a scarcely mitigated disaster.”4
The agency’s relationship with the Nixon White House was oftentimes strained. Nixon’s national security advisor from 1969 to 1973, Henry Kissinger, established a precedent followed by many of his successors by centralizing control over the entire U.S. government’s national security apparatus in his office in the West Wing of the White House, including control of key intelligence assets, especially the super-sensitive SIGINT product coming out of NSA. Kissinger ordered that all NSA intercepts mentioning him or Nixon by name be routed to him exclusively and to nobody else in the U.S. intelligence community. According to former CIA deputy director for intelligence Ray Cline, the CIA objected strongly to this practice, stating that “it made a very serious impact, adverse to the efficient workings of the intelligence community.” Kissinger also ordered that certain particularly sensitive NSA intercepts not be shared with the secretaries of state and defense. Colonel Robert Pursley, assistant to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, recalled that Laird “always had the feeling we weren’t getting all the [NSA] stuff the White House was. Very little intercept mail was going to Mel and most of what we got was so innocuous.” When Kissinger became secretary of state in September 1973, he continued the practice of maintaining a back-channel flow of intelligence from NSA.5Senior NSA officials who dealt with the White House, such as David McManis, the head of the White House Situation Room, walked a fine line trying to keep on the right side of the law, and not always successfully. As a declassified NSA history admits, “It was not good for SIGINT, and it was deadly for the presidency.”6
The Shootdown of the EC-121
On April 14, 1969, two North Korean MiG-21 fighters shot down a U.S. Navy EC-121M SIGINT aircraft ninety miles southeast of the North Korean port of Chongjin, over international waters. The aircraft and its crew of thirty-one, including nine navy and marine SIGINT operators, were lost.7
The EC-121M took off from Atsugi Naval Air Station, in Japan, at seven a.m. local time on what was supposed to be a routine Beggar Shadow SIGINT collection mission over the Sea of Japan. The mission had been flown more than 190 times without incident by U.S. Navy and Air Force reconnaissance aircraft during the first three months of 1969 alone, so local navy commanders thought there was no reason that this mission should be any different.8
The U.S. Air Force listening post at Osan followed every moment of the North Korean attack until one forty-nine p.m., when intercepted North Korean radar tracking intercepts showed the North Korean MiGs returning to base and the stricken EC-121 descending rapidly in a spiral toward the sea.9
Radio operators at the EC-121’s home base at Atsugi initially hoped that the aircraft’s pilot had “hit the deck” to evade the MiGs. But when the plane did not answer repeated calls, at two forty-four p.m. a CRITIC message was issued noting only that the EC-121 was missing and its fate was unknown. An hour and fifteen minutes later, North Korean state radio announced that its fighters had shot down an American “spy plane.”10
On April 18, an angry President Nixon revealed at a press conference that NSA had read the North Korean air defense radar tracking codes, stating, “What is even more important, they knew [that the aircraft was over international waters] based on their radar. Therefore this attack was unprovoked. It was deliberate. It was without warning.” Officials at NSA fell off their chairs when they heard this astounding compromise of a critical NSA capability. A former senior NSA official recalled, “I know it was wrong, but I wanted to take Nixon across my knee and give him the paddling of his life for what he had done. It was inexcusable.” 11
Exit Carter, Enter Gayler
In August 1969, NSA director General Marshall “Pat” Carter retired from active duty. To put it mildly, there were very few tears shed in Washington when Pat Carter stepped down after four years running the agency. Champagne corks popped throughout CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on Carter’s last day in office. His subdued retirement ceremony at the Pentagon lasted only ten minutes, with an NSA historian dryly noting, “The Pentagon was [sic] happy to see the last of Marshall Carter as Carter was to leave the wars.”12
Carter’s replacement was a distinguished fifty-four-year-old navy vice admiral named Noel Gayler (pronounced “guy-ler”), who got the job because he was a protégé of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the new chief of naval operations. Gayler was considered by many in the Pentagon to be a perfect fit because he was one of the brightest and most capable officers in the military. The son of a career navy officer, he had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1935 and spent most of his career as a naval aviator. During World War II, he had been a fighter pilot flying off the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, winning three Navy Crosses, the first naval aviator to achieve this distinction. He was also the third navy officer to have flown a jet aircraft and had piloted the longest flight to date launched from an aircraft carrier. Prior to joining NSA, Gayler had overseen the selection of nuclear attack targets inside the USSR. But unlike his recent predecessors at NSA, he had no prior intelligence experience.13
The job was a stepping-stone to higher office, Gayler had been assured, but it came with a price tag. Secretary of Defense Laird approved the selection of Gayler and his counterpart at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), General Donald Bennett, because, as Laird later recalled, he could count on their loyalty. As Laird told them in a meeting in his office, they would have to be loyal to him if they expected to “get four stars after four years. And goddam it, they were loyal.”14
Gayler was not an easy man to get to know, much less like. Described by an NSA historian as “dynamic, mercurial, and high-strung,” he was a strict, by-the-book naval officer who ran a tight ship and did not tolerate dissent.15
Because he did not have a technological background Gayler was never able to fully grasp the details of the important work that his agency performed. “We were told to ‘dumb-down’ our briefings,” a former NSA official recalled.16Frequently frustrated by the complexity of NSA’s mission, Gayler later told a congressional staff member, “I often felt like a fire hose was held to my mouth.” He spent most of his three years as director trying to understand the mechanics of how his agency worked, and he wondered why a more experienced navy intelligence officer had not been selected for the post. Like so many directors before him, Gayler depended heavily on his civilian deputy, Louis Tordella, to run the agency while he handled high-level policy matters, especially NSA’s testy relations with the U.S. military.17
SIGINT and SALT I
NSA played an enormously important role in the negotiations that led up to the signing, on May 26, 1972, in Moscow of two Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty agreements (collectively known to posterity as SALT I). The first agreement was the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which limited both the United States and the USSR to a set number of ABM launchers. The second agreement set firm limits on the total number of strategic nuclear weapons that the two nations could deploy and established strict guidelines for what new strategic nuclear weapons could be developed in the future.
The covert intercept posts inside the American and British embassies in Moscow, code-named Broadside and Tryst, had collected highly valuable intelligence, code-named Gamma Guppy, since at least the early 1960s, by listening in on the Soviet leadership as they talked over the mobile phones in their Chaika limousines. These intercepts were deemed to be so sensitive that their distribution was limited to a very small number of American and British government officials. Then, in 1972, the Canadian SIGINT organization, CBNRC, opened its own small clandestine SIGINT intercept facility in Moscow (code-named Stephanie), hidden inside the military attaché’s o
ffice in the Canadian embassy. The Stephanie intercept equipment, which was supplied by NSA, was able to intercept many of the radio and telephone signals that were being broadcast from the top of the huge Ostankino radio and TV tower, which loomed over downtown Moscow.18
The Gamma Guppy intercepts provided a window, albeit a narrow and imperfect one, into what was going on inside the Kremlin, including decision-making processes, as well as details on the organization of the Soviet Politburo and the personalities and behavior of key Politburo figures.19The current director of national intelligence, Rear Admiral John “Mike” McConnell, who served as director of NSA from 1992 to 1996, recalled:
In the mid-1970s, NSA had access to just about everything the Russian leadership said to themselves and about one another . . . we knew Brezhnev’s waist size, his headaches, his wife, his wife’s problems, his kids’ problems, his intentions on the Politburo with regard to positions, his opinion on the American leadership, his attitude on negotiations, and on and on and on it goes.20
But in September 1971, nationally syndicated newspaper columnist Jack Anderson revealed in an article that “for years, the CIA has been able to listen to the kingpins of the Kremlin banter, bicker, and backbite among themselves.” According to Anderson’s column, the intercepts revealed that “the Soviet leaders gossip about one another and complain about their ailments like old maids.” After Anderson’s column appeared, the Russians reportedly shut off NSA’s access to their car telephone traffic. According to Admiral McConnell, “Jack Anderson published it on Tuesday and it was gone on Thursday, never to be recovered.”21
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