The Secret Sentry

by Matthew M. Aid

  Despite the fact that Gamma Guppy had been compromised, the Soviet leaders continued to use this insecure form of communications. The Gamma Guppy intelligence continued to roll in. For example, on May 22, 1972, four days before SALT was signed, National Security Advisor Kissinger informed President Nixon that “very recent developments in Moscow indicate that [General Secretary Leonid] Brezhnev has encountered certain problems regarding his foreign policy . . . There is a suggestion in a sensitive intercept that Brezhnev used his friend [Soviet Defense Minister Andrei] Grechko to justify his military policies, including SALT.”22On May 26, the embassy listening post intercepted a crucial radio-telephone conversation between Brezhnev and Grechko about the Soviet negotiating position on the last day of the summit meeting with President Nixon before the signing of SALT I. Grechko assured Brezhnev that the huge SS-19 ICBM then being tested could be placed inside the existing SS-11 ICBM silo, thus bypassing the provision of article 2 of SALT I, which limited increases in silo dimensions to 15 percent. According to publicly available information, American negotiators “maneuvered with [the SIGINT intercepts] so effectively that they came home with the agreement not to build an antiballistic missile defense system.” A senior U.S. intelligence official who read the intercepts was quoted as saying, “That’s the sort of thing that pays NSA’s wages for a year.”23

  But after more U.S. news reports (many of them inaccurate) during the early 1970s revealed the role played by the Gamma Guppy intercepts, the Soviets apparently decided to take action. In 1973, they began installing powerful jamming equipment in apartment buildings surrounding the U.S. embassy, and then periodically bombarded the building with microwave signals. U.S. intelligence officials believed the Russians were trying to interfere with or block American eavesdropping equipment. But it was not until May 1975 that the Russians began a continuous microwave bombardment that, according to a declassified CIA report, was done because of “Soviet embarrassment and dismay caused by US press accounts . . . alluding to a US capability to intercept micro wave communications in Moscow.”24

  Lew Allen Takes the Helm

  In June 1972, Admiral Gayler left NSA—and got his fourth star when Nixon promoted him to the post of heading up CINCPAC, in Hawaii.

  His replacement as director of NSA was Air Force Lieutenant General Samuel Phillips, fifty-one, who like Gayler had no intelligence experience before arriving at Fort Meade. Phillips was an accomplished research engineer, holding a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan. He worked on nuclear delivery systems (aircraft and missiles) and the Apollo project, and just prior to his appointment to NSA he had been responsible for launching missiles and satellites into space.25

  Phillips did not remain at NSA long enough to leave an imprint, much less a legacy. According to his successor, Lieutenant General Lew Allen, shortly after arriving at NSA, Phillips became aware of his agency’s involvement in a number of peripheral issues relating to the escalating Watergate scandal, which “influenced his determination to move on.”26The one significant decision Phillips made that was to have a long-term impact was to begin “civilianizing” many SIGINT collection functions formerly performed by the military, as well as automating many of NSA’s SIGINT processing, analytic, and reporting functions so as to reduce the agency’s huge civilian payroll.27

  On August 19, 1973, Phillips was replaced by Allen, a forty-eight-year-old U.S. Air Force officer who was a rare individual for the U.S. military—a certifiable genius who also had a talent for management and a deep understanding of, and interest in, technical matters. He started his air force career as a nuclear weapons ordnance officer with the Strategic Air Command, but his intellect predestined him for greater things. The air force sent him to the University of Illinois, where he obtained both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. Upon graduating, he was ordered to the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, where he worked from 1954 to 1957 as a physicist in the nuclear weapons test division studying the effects of high-altitude nuclear detonations on missiles. He then moved into the field of satellite reconnaissance, serving for eight years with the U.S. Air Force component of the National Reconnaissance Office in Los Angeles, from 1965 to 1973. After a brief tenure as the assistant to the director of the CIA for the Intelligence Community Staff, Allen’s benefactor in Washington, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, arranged for him to become director of NSA.28

  Perhaps one of the brightest men ever to sit in the NSA director’s office, Allen proved to be the perfect man to hold the post during what would be one of the most difficult periods in the agency’s history. Some of Allen’s subordinates at NSA recalled that the highly focused and businesslike director’s face didn’t reveal much about what he was thinking. Those who got to know him quickly warmed to him, even those who were not necessarily friends of NSA. L. Britt Snider, who in 1975 was the chief counsel of the Church Committee, which was investigating NSA’s domestic activities, described Allen as “a man of impeccable integrity,” seemingly a rare virtue in those troubled days in Washington.29

  Allen’s four-year tenure as NSA director was marred by controversy, with NSA being forced to admit publicly in August 1975 that it had engaged in illegal domestic eavesdropping since 1945. Allen was compelled to testify before Congress, the first time ever that an NSA director testified in public session about the activities of the agency.30

  NSA Enters the Space Race

  Unbeknownst to the American public, Allen’s tenure was also marked by a number of secret cryptologic successes, many of them brought on by the introduction of new high-tech spying systems, such as a new generation of satellites placed into orbits chosen specifically to facilitate the monitoring of Soviet communications traffic.

  Three new types of SIGINT satellites, whose classified nicknames were Canyon, Jumpseat, and Chalet, were put into orbit starting in the late 1960s and continuing throughout the 1970s. These satellites gave NSA access for the first time to high-level telephone traffic deep inside the USSR that was being carried over micro wave radio-relay networks.31The level of detail obtained from the intercepts produced by these satellites was so high that a former American intelligence officer stated “We could hear their teeth chattering in the Ukraine.”32

  The CIA’s brand-new Rhyolite SIGINT satellite revolutionized the U.S. intelligence community’s knowledge of Soviet strategic weapons development by intercepting previously unheard telemetry data coming from Soviet strategic ballistic missile and bomber test sites deep inside the Soviet Union. The former CIA deputy director for science and technology Albert Wheelon was to later write that thanks to this satellite, “the intelligence community eventually had almost the same data on each ICBM flight as that available to Soviet engineers. It was immediately clear from the telemetry what type of missile had been flown. When test launches failed, the reason was usually apparent in the telemetry data and the missile’s reliability could be established with some confidence. As the Soviets changed from single warhead missiles to multiple warhead reentry vehicles, that change was apparent in the data.”33

  Then, in the fall of 1976, the U.S. Navy ELINT organization launched into orbit the first of its brand-new ocean surveillance satellites, whose classified nickname was Parcae. The system had the unclassified designation of White Cloud, and its clusters of satellites continuously orbited the earth, allowing the navy to track the movements of virtually every warship— Russian, Chinese, or otherwise— on a real-time basis and to a degree that heretofore had not been possible or even imagined.34According to an Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)–sponsored historical study, “ELINT collection and analysis improved to such an extent that individual Soviet units could be tracked through entire deployments by following the radiation emitted by their navigation and surface-search radar sets.”35

  The 1973 Arab-Israeli War

  On October 6, 1973, one hundred thousand Egyptian troops backed by one thousand tanks launched a surprise attack on Israel across t
he Suez Canal, and fifty thousand Syrian troops advanced into the Golan Heights. Not only were the Israelis caught entirely by surprise, but so was the U.S. intelligence community. Postmortem studies conducted by the community revealed that NSA’s reporting on Egypt and Syria’s preparations for attacking Israel either had been rejected out of hand by the CIA’s intelligence analysts or had been so secret that the vast majority of the analysts at Langley had not been cleared to see it.36

  The Top Secret Codeword daily and weekly SIGINT summaries prior to the attack from NSA’s Office of the Middle East, North Africa, Cuba, Central and South America (G6), then headed by navy captain Dwane Yoder, were chockfull of high-quality intelligence reporting about political, military, and economic activities in the Arab world. Not only did NSA have particularly deep and comprehensive insights into the capabilities of the Egyptian army, the Arab world’s largest, but it also had detected the arrival of North Korean fighter pilots and air defense personnel as well as Iraqi Hawker Hunter and Libyan Mirage fighters. The CIA and NSA clandestine listening posts hidden inside the U.S. embassies in Cairo and Damascus were also providing Washington with excellent intelligence from their coverage of local government, military, and police radio traffic. A former CIA operations officer who was in Cairo in 1973 recalled, “We even knew what [Egyptian president Anwar] Sadat was telling his ministers on the phone.”37

  The problem was that since 1967, CIA intelligence analysts back in Washington had formed a distinctly negative impression of the readiness and overall combat capabilities of the Egyptian and Syrian militaries, a view encouraged by reports supplied by Israeli intelligence. When Sadat kicked his Russian military advisers out of Egypt in July 1972, DIA and CIA intelligence analysts further downgraded their estimates of Egyptian combat capabilities, particularly those of Sadat’s air force, an estimate that was, unfortunately, reinforced by some NSA SIGINT intelligence sent to Langley.38

  And yet, starting in the summer of 1973, accumulating NSA SIGINT data clearly indicated that Egypt and Syria were preparing to attack Israel, and in late September NSA reported that it would be “a major offensive.” The SIGINT evidence for these preparations was voluminous and highly detailed, including the fact that the Egyptian military had canceled leaves and mobilized its reserves, and that a special command post outside Cairo that in the past had been used only for crisis situations had been activated. Extremely sensitive NSA Top Secret Gamma intercepts also revealed that “a major foreign nation [the Soviet Union] had become extremely sensitive to the prospect of war and concerned about their citizens and dependents in Egypt.” All this led NSA intelligence analysts to conclude that war was imminent.39

  The CIA postmortem study noted, “The information provided by those parts of the Intelligence Community responsible for intelligence collection [NSA] was sufficient to prompt such a warning. Such information (derived from both human and technical sources) was not conclusive but was plentiful, ominous, and often accurate.”40

  But the CIA analysts responsible for the Middle East rejected the intelligence reporting and warnings coming from NSA. Navy captain Norman Klar, who in 1974 took over as head of the NSA’s G6 office, recalled, “the NIO [the CIA’s national intelligence officer] refused to accept SIGINT information that an attack was imminent. He insisted it was an exercise, because the Arabs wouldn’t be ‘stupid enough’ to attack Israel.”41Both DIA and the CIA ignored or paid scant heed to the NSA warnings, and the CIA Watch Committee chose to ignore the data completely and reported to the White House that war in the Middle East was not imminent. The CIA postmortem study concluded, “Those elements of the Intelligence Community responsible for the production of finished intelligence [notably the CIA!] did not perceive the growing possibility of an Arab attack and thus did not warn of its imminence.”42

  The CIA protested, after the fact, that its analysts had been swamped by hundreds of unintelligible SIGINT summaries, but NSA fired back, arguing that if it had been able to get its unvarnished SIGINT summaries through to the White House without the CIA’s intelligence analysts putting their “spin” on the material, it would have been clear that Egypt and Syria were about to attack.43

  NSA director Lew Allen “resolved that in the future [he] would ensure that a separate view be presented when the judgment of SIGINT analysts [differed] from the common [i.e., CIA, DIA, and other agencies’] view.” Allen and his successors fought furiously to ensure that in future the White House would be fully informed about their agency’s views, especially if they conflicted with those of the CIA.44

  Norm Klar’s Tour de Force

  In February 1974, Frank Raven, head of NSA’s G Group, which was responsible for SIGINT coverage of all noncommunist countries around the world, gave Norman Klar command of his group’s largest and most important unit, the 400-man G6 office. Klar was one of NSA’s best cryptanalysts. Trained as a Chinese linguist, he had spent much of his career in the Far East, serving tours of duty in Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines before returning to Fort Meade in 1971. Raven had initially given him the task of running the part of G Group that broke the codes and ciphers of India and Pakistan. Much of the intelligence reporting produced by Klar’s division during the December 1971 war between India and Pakistan had ended up on the desks of President Nixon and Henry Kissinger.45

  Over the next six years, Klar’s unit handled a half-dozen wars and untold numbers of smaller conflicts, including the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the Cuban military interventions in Angola and Ethiopia, the bloody civil war in Lebanon, the 1976 Israeli hostage rescue mission at Entebbe, Uganda, the fall of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, the collapse of the shah of Iran’s regime and his replacement by the radical cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the resulting hostage crisis, and, finally, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Klar later joked that his unit was NSA’s “crisis management shop,” since nothing that G6 handled was ever routine. “We operated under a microscope . . . sometimes we were handling two or three high profile crises at the same time with everything we were producing going straight to the White House.”46

  Klar’s unit became the hub of the U.S. intelligence community’s first counterterrorism effort, in 1972, and made the first breaks into the communications of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the host of competing Palestinian terrorist organizations in places like Lebanon. In 1973, the unit’s SIGINT helped thwart a plot to bomb Israeli diplomatic establishments and businesses in New York City, and G6 was instrumental in warning that Palestinian terrorists intended to assassinate Secretary of State Kissinger during a 1974 visit to Damascus. By 1979, NSA was reading some of Arafat’s most sensitive cable traffic and listening in on his international telephone calls to great effect.47

  Klar’s unit performed well during the civil war in Angola that raged from 1975 through the late 1980s. When the first Cuban combat troops were sent there in September 1975 to prop up the Soviet-supported Angolan regime, the cryptanalysts in G6 made daily, highly detailed reports on the Cuban troops and their Soviet military advisers, including information on Cuban combat losses suffered while they fought with South African forces in late 1975 and early 1976.48

  When civil war erupted in Lebanon in 1975, followed almost immediately by Syrian military intervention in the country, NSA stepped up its SIGINT coverage of what was going on there, including the redeployment of a MiG-21 fighter regiment to Al Qusayr, in northeastern Syria, where it could be used in Lebanon.49

  SIGINT and the Panama Canal Negotiations

  In 1974, President Gerald Ford opened negotiations with Panamanian strongman General Omar Torrijos over transferring control of the Panama Canal from the United States to Panama. By 1976, the two countries were beginning to make significant headway in their negotiations, despite the fact that Torrijos had sought added leverage by having Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Noriega, the head of the Guardia Nacional G-2, Panama’s foreign intelligence organization, stage demonstr
ations and attacks on Americans.

  Virtually everything Torrijos said over the telephone from his office and from his home in Farallón, outside Panama City, was carried over an easily intercepted and American-built micro wave network. His conversations were secretly sucked up by a nondescript U.S. Army antenna array at Albrook Air Force Station, which overlooked Panama City. Torrijos’s calls were immediately forwarded to U.S. Army intercept operators at Fort Clayton, inside the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone, who taped the calls and urgently forwarded all the processed material to NSA headquarters.50Klar’s Spanish linguists and analysts in the G6 office, on the third floor of the NSA operations building, sent hastily made translations and analysts’ comments via teletype to the State Department and the NSC “within 24 hours after their Panamanian counterparts got them.”51

  This continued from 1975 to 1977, providing the United States with not only salacious material about Torrijos’s extracurricular love life, but also vital details on the protracted canal negotiations. The White House and State Department customers effusively commended NSA for this invaluable information, and in 1978, NSA awarded the annual Travis Trophy, denoting the best strategic SIGINT unit working for NSA, to the U.S. Army’s 470th Military Intelligence Group in Panama.52

  But in the spring of 1976, U.S. Army intelligence officials picked up the first indications that Colonel Noriega had penetrated the American SIGINT operation in Panama, and they soon discovered that a twenty-year-old sergeant and Spanish linguist assigned to the 408th ASA Company at Fort Clayton had passed classified information to Noriega’s Guardia Nacional G-2. A full-scale inquiry, designated Canton Song, was launched into the sergeant’s activities on April 23, 1976.53

  After an intensive investigation of, and a grant of immunity to, the sergeant (who also implicated another linguist in his unit), it was determined that vital intelligence, including details on how the U.S. Army intended to defend the Panama Canal, had been betrayed to the Panamanians. For his work, the sergeant received only sixteen thousand dollars, much of which he quickly blew on local prostitutes. In January 1976, he tried to sell the same information to the Cuban embassy in Panama City, but the Cubans threw him out, believing that he was a CIA agent provocateur.54