Based on a few intercepts, some CIA agent reports, and some satellite imagery, during the period from April to July 1979 Klar’s G6 office came to the conclusion that a Soviet combat unit of brigade size was stationed in Cuba. As former CIA director Stansfield Turner notes in his memoirs, this “was a big inference from a sparse fact or two.” Without the approval of the CIA, NSA published its findings in the July 13 edition of the “Green Hornet,” as NSA’s daily compendium of SIGINT “news,” the SIGINT Summary, was widely known in Washington.86
The U.S. intelligence community, already concerned about the Cuban military’s role in Angola and Ethiopia, as well as the increasingly unstable political situation in Central America, was upset by NSA’s action, and an incensed Stan Turner informed the White House that NSA’s actions constituted a direct violation of the prohibition against its producing finished intelligence reports for the president, a function reserved for the CIA.87
On July 19, the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community issued a report that tentatively concluded “that a Soviet ground forces brigade was possibly stationed in Cuba, but that its size, location(s), and mission were uncertain.” Then, triggered by an intercepted message, on August 17, a CIA reconnaissance satellite passed over Cuba and found the brigade, engaged in a routine military exercise, which led to the CIA’s issuing a report on September 18 (basically confirming the original NSA missive) stating that a twenty-six-hundred-man Soviet combat brigade was then in Cuba and had probably been there since at least 1964, if not since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.88
When this leaked out to the press, it touched off a political firestorm in Washington that almost destroyed whatever gains had been made since the signing of SALT I in 1972 in terms of improving U.S.-Soviet relations, which was perhaps the reason the report was leaked in the first place.89
The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
Since there have been so few success stories in American intelligence history, when one comes along, it is worthwhile to examine it to see what went right. NSA’s performance in the months prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was one of these rare cases. Not only did all of the new high-tech intelligence-collection sensors that NSA had purchased in the 1970s work as intended, but the raw data that they collected was processed in a timely fashion, which enabled Bobby Ray Inman to boast that his agency had accurately predicted that the Soviets would invade Afghanistan.90
As opposition to the Soviet-supported Afghan regime in Kabul headed by President Nur Mohammed Taraki mounted in late 1978 and early 1979, the Soviets continued to increase their military presence in the country, until it had grown to five Russian generals and about a thousand military advisers.91A rebellion in the northeastern Afghan city of Herat in mid-March 1979 in which one hundred Russian military and civilian personnel were killed was put down by Afghan troops from Kandahar, but not before an estimated three thousand to five thousand Afghans had died in the fighting.92
At this point, satellite imagery and SIGINT detected unusual activity by the two Soviet combat divisions stationed along the border with Afghanistan.
The CIA initially regarded these units as engaged in military exercises, but these “exercises” fit right into a scenario for a Soviet invasion. On March 26– 27, SIGINT detected a steady stream of Russian reinforcements and heavy equipment being flown to Bagram airfield, north of Kabul, and by June, the intelligence community estimated that the airlift had brought in a total of twenty-five hundred personnel, which included fifteen hundred airborne troops and additional “advisers” as well as the crews of a squadron of eight AN-12 military transport aircraft now based in-country. SIGINT revealed that the Russians were also secretly setting up a command-and-control communications network inside Afghanistan; it would be used to direct the Soviet intervention in December 1979.93
In the last week of August and the first weeks of September, satellite imagery and SIGINT revealed preparations for Soviet operations obviously aimed at Afghanistan, including forward deployment of Soviet IL-76 and AN-12 military transport aircraft that were normally based in the European portion of the USSR.94
So clear were all these indications that CIA director Turner sent a Top Secret Umbra memo to the NSC on September 14 warning, “The Soviet leaders may be on the threshold of a decision to commit their own forces to prevent the collapse of the Taraki regime and protect their sizeable stake in Afghanistan. Small Soviet combat units may have already arrived in the country.”95
On September 16, President Taraki was deposed in a coup d’état, and his pro-Moscow deputy, Hafizullah Amin, took his place as the leader of Afghanistan.
Over the next two weeks, American reconnaissance satellites and SIGINT picked up increased signs of Soviet mobilization, including three divisions on the border and the movement of many Soviet military transport aircraft from their home bases to air bases near the barracks of two elite airborne divisions, strongly suggesting an invasion was imminent.96
On September 28, the CIA concluded that “in the event of a breakdown of control in Kabul, the Soviets would be likely to deploy one or more Soviet airborne divisions to the Kabul vicinity to protect Soviet citizens as well as to ensure the continuance of some pro-Soviet regime in the capital.”97Then, in October, SIGINT detected the call-up of thousands of Soviet reservists in the Central Asian republics.98
Throughout November and December, NSA monitored and the CIA reported on virtually every move made by Soviet forces. The CIA advised the White House on December 19 that the Russians had perhaps as many as three airborne battalions at Bagram, and NSA predicted on December 22, three full days before the first Soviet troops crossed the Soviet-Afghan border, that the Russians would invade Afghanistan within the next seventy-two hours.99
NSA’s prediction was right on the money. The Russians had an ominous Christmas present for Afghanistan, and NSA unwrapped it. Late on Christmas Eve, Russian linguists at the U.S. Air Force listening posts at Royal Air Force Chicksands, north of London, and San Vito dei Normanni Air Station, in southern Italy, detected the takeoff from air bases in the western USSR of the first of 317 Soviet military transport flights carrying elements of two Russian airborne divisions and heading for Afghanistan; on Christmas morning, the CIA issued a final intelligence report saying that the Soviets had prepared for a massive intervention and might “have started to move into that country in force today.” SIGINT indicated that a large force of Soviet paratroopers was headed for Afghanistan—and then, at six p.m. Kabul time, it ascertained that the first of the Soviet IL-76 and AN-22 military transport aircraft had touched down at Bagram Air Base and the Kabul airport carrying the first elements of the 103rd Guards Airborne Division and an in dependent parachute regiment. Three days later, the first of twenty-five thousand troops of Lieutenant General Yuri Vladimirovich Tukharinov’s Fortieth Army began crossing the Soviet-Afghan border.100.CIA, Afghan Task Force, intelligence memorandum,
The studies done after the Afghan invasion all characterized the performance of the U.S. intelligence community as an “intelligence success story.”101NSA’s newfound access to high-level Soviet communications enabled the agency to accurately monitor and report quickly on virtually every key facet of the Soviet military’s activities. As we shall see in the next chapter, Afghanistan may have been the “high water mark” for NSA.102.Johnson,
Postscript
By the end of the 1970s, NSA had been largely rebuilt thanks to the efforts of Lew Allen and Bobby Ray Inman. Despite the dramatic cuts in its size, the agency remained, as a former senior NSA official, Eugene Becker, put it, “a several billion dollar a year corporation, with thousands of people operating a global system.”103 It had, thanks to a new generation of spy satellites and other technical sensors, once again gained access to high-level Soviet communications. It did not take long before NSA was producing reliable intelligence on what was going on behind the iron curtain. According to a declassified NSA history, “even with decreased money, cryptolog
y was yielding the best information that it had produced since World War II.”104
CHAPTER 10
Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano
NSA During the Reagan and Bush Administrations
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLY, "OZYMANDIAS"
General Lincoln Faurer: April 1981–April 1985
On April 1, 1981, Admiral Bobby Inman became the deputy director of the CIA. He was replaced at the helm of NSA by Lieutenant General Lincoln Faurer of the U.S. Air Force. A 1950 graduate of West Point, Faurer had a résumé filled with intelligence experience, including DIA vice director for production and director of intelligence of U.S. Eu ro pean Command in West Germany.1
Amiable and easy to get along with, Linc Faurer seems to have been liked by virtually everyone, including his predecessor and six former senior NSA officials interviewed for this book, who felt he was a man to whom you could take problems without fear of recrimination. He was fortunate to have as his deputy Ann Caracristi, an extremely capable NSA cryptanalyst, who served as deputy director of NSA from April 1, 1980, to July 31, 1982. Caracristi’s successor, Robert Rich, who served from August 1, 1982, to July 1986, was a Far East expert. Caracristi and Rich handled internal management while Faurer focused on NSA’s relations with Washington and foreign collaborating agencies.2
Faurer’s four years at NSA were tumultuous. Shortly after President Ronald Reagan took office, Faurer persuaded Congress to allocate a huge amount of funding for a dramatic expansion of NSA’s workforce, which grew by 27 percent, to twenty-three thousand personnel, between 1981 and 1985; the agency was forced to lease space in nearby office buildings to temporarily house the staff overflow. In 1982, Congress funded two new large buildings adjacent to NSA headquarters, Operations 2A and 2B, and NSA expanded its mission to include operations security and computer security.3
When Faurer became director, 58 percent of the agency’s resources were devoted to covering the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies. The remainder was dedicated to some twenty “hard target” countries, including China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, and Libya. But within the first months of his tenure, NSA’s SIGINT operations took on new directions as innovative high-tech collection systems came online—while new crises erupted and targets of opportunity presented themselves.4
The Gulf of Sidra
In July 1981, President Reagan ordered the U.S. Navy to conduct a naval exercise in the Gulf of Sidra, which Libya claimed as its territorial waters but which all other nations held to be international waters. The CIA warned the White House and the Pentagon, “The Libyan Government is likely to view the exercise as a conspiracy directed against it. The possibility of a hostile tactical reaction resulting in a skirmish is real. Even without such a skirmish, the Libyan Government may view the penetration of its claimed waters and airspace as ‘an incident’ and that Syrian pilots operating Libyan MiG fighters at Benina Air Base were the most likely to attack U.S. aircraft if the Libyans chose to initiate combat.”5
Despite the CIA’s warning, the exercise proceeded as planned, and on August 19 a Libyan SU-22 Fitter fighter fired an air-to-air missile at two U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcat fighters from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz over the Gulf of Sidra. The missile missed its target, but the Tomcats shot down the Libyan jet. U.S. Navy radio intercept operators on a nearby SIGINT EA-3B aircraft and aboard the destroyer USS Caron monitored all of the radio traffic of the Libyan fighter pilot during the engagement, which showed that the Libyans had deliberately sought a fight with the American planes.6
Unbeknownst to Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the cryptanalysts in NSA’s G Group had for years been able to read the most sensitive Libyan diplomatic and intelligence ciphers. The agency was also listening to all of Qaddafi’s telephone calls, which proved to be an important source of intelligence about the Libyan leader’s intentions. A day or two after the Gulf of Sidra shootdown, an American listening post intercepted a phone call from an enraged Qaddafi to Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam, in which Qaddafi swore that he would kill President Reagan to avenge the insult. As a result of this warning, the U.S. Secret Service increased the level of its protection of President Reagan, but no tangible threat surfaced and the security alert was called off in December 1981.7
The CENTAM Conundrum
In August 1981, the Reagan administration began to publicly assert that the United States now had firm intelligence showing that Nicaragua’s Sandinista government had intensified its covert arms supply to the FMLN guerrillas inside El Salvador. NSA had been reading Nicaragua’s diplomatic codes for months, as well as intercepting most of the radio traffic between Managua and the rebels in El Salvador. At the request of the White House, in November the agency increased its SIGINT coverage of the Sandinista regime and began tracking the movements of the FMLN guerrilla units, who were now powerful enough to threaten the stability of the newly elected Salvadoran government of José Napoleon Duarte.8
NSA threw a vast amount of SIGINT collection resources at the FMLN guerrillas. In July 1981, huge RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft flying from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska began conducting SIGINT collection missions off the coast of El Salvador, followed by other airborne intercept operations through October, enabling U.S. intelligence to monitor FMLN activities and share the take with the Salvadoran military. If the locations of FMLN radio transmitters were triangulated, U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunships were called in from Panama to destroy the guerrilla bases, all of which was done in complete secrecy. It was a very serious and very secret war that was being fought in El Salvador.9
In December, the U.S. Navy began stationing a SIGINT-equipped destroyer off the coast of El Salvador as part of Jittery Prop, an operation to intercept radio traffic related to arms shipments and to pinpoint the locations of Nicaraguan military and Salvadoran guerrilla radio transmitters. When the U.S. press broke the story about Jittery Prop in February 1982, the FMLN guerrillas switched radio frequencies, and NSA temporarily lost its ability to listen to the transmitters, but by the early summer of 1982 Jittery Prop ships had restored their SIGINT coverage of the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran guerilla radio nets.10
Virtually all of the best evidence available was coming from SIGINT, including NSA’s almost daily intercepts containing status reports from almost all FMLN units operating inside El Salvador. But the Reagan administration chose not to make the evidence provided by the intercepts public, apparently to avoid compromising the source.11
Beginning in late 1983, however, NSA’s access began to drop off dramatically as the Nicaraguan regime began to tighten up its communications security. New Russian-made cipher machines were put into use on all major Nicaraguan communications circuits, and communication between Managua and the FMLN was converted to unbreakable one-time pad systems.12
KAL 007
At three twenty-six a.m. (local time) on September 1, 1983, Major Gennadiy Nikolayevich Osipovich, a veteran SU-15 fighter pilot assigned to the Soviet 777th Fighter Aviation Regiment at Dolinsk-Sokol Air Base on Sakhalin Island, fired two AA-3 Anab missiles at a Korean Airlines Boeing 747 as it was exiting Soviet airspace west of the island. The airliner, whose flight number was KAL 007, was flying from New York to Seoul via Anchorage. Both of Osipovich’s missiles hit the passenger aircraft. For the next twelve minutes, the 747 spiraled downward, before impacting on the water below. All 269 passengers and crew were killed, including U.S. congressman Lawrence “Larry” McDonald.13
U.S. Air Force radio intercept operators working the night shift at the NSA listening post at Misawa, Japan, had monitored the entire sequence of events from the moment the Korean airliner had veered off course and entered Soviet airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula. An hour before KAL 007 was shot down, the intercept operators at Misawa had noted an increased volume of Soviet air defense radio transmissions as the Kore
an airliner crossed Kamchatka. Russian radar tracking activity throughout the Far East increased dramatically, and several MiG fighters were detected in intercepts taking off from Petropavlovsk-Yelizovo Air Base on Kamchatka. SIGINT analysts in the Far East concluded at the time that in all likelihood the activity was part of an unannounced air defense exercise.14
As the 747 crossed Sakhalin Island, unaware of the chaos going on around it, a highly classified thirty-man NSA radio intercept facility at Wakkanai on the northernmost tip of the Japanese island of Hokkaido, called Project Clef, began intercepting, at two fifty-six a.m. (thirty minutes before the shootdown took place), highly unusual radio transmissions from four Russian fighter interceptors who appeared to be conducting live intercept operations just across the La Perouse Strait (between Sakhalin Island and Hokkaido) against an unknown target. One of the intercept operators at Wakkanai happened to be sitting on the air-to-ground radio frequency of Major Osipo vich’s fighter regiment at Dolinsk-Sokol, which proved to be providential because as he sat listening to the Russian fighter pilot’s radio transmissions he heard the fateful transmissions at three twenty-six a.m. indicating that Osipovich had fired his missiles (“I have executed the launch”), followed two seconds later by the Russian fighter pilot reporting to his ground controller that “the target is destroyed.” It was this tape recording that was to figure so highly in the days and weeks that followed.15
When the first CRITIC report from Misawa hit Washington early on the morning of September 1, it set into motion a chain of events that would have severe repercussions for U.S.-Soviet relations. Secretary of State George Shultz pushed hard to get NSA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community to agree to allow him to release to the public the tape-recorded intercept of Major Osipo vich shooting down the airliner, later telling an interviewer, “It’s a pretty chilling tape. It seemed to me that was a critical thing to get out. With the President’s support I managed to get the intelligence people to release it. It was hard because they didn’t want to release it.”16
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