The Secret Sentry

by Matthew M. Aid

  At ten forty-five a.m. (Washington time), Shultz walked to the podium in the Press Briefing Room at the State Department and laid out the facts about the shootdown, such as they were known at the time. But in doing so, he revealed a great deal about NSA’s role in the affair, something which the astute reporters in Washington quickly picked up on, to the intense chagrin of senior agency officials at Fort Meade.17

  But it turned out that in their rush to pillory the Soviets, much of what Shultz told the press about the incident turned out to be flat-out wrong. NSA analysts were still trying to put together a complete and accurate translation at the same time the Reagan administration was releasing selected extracts from the intercepts to buttress their case that the Soviets had committed an act of mass murder. It was not until late on the afternoon on September 1 that NSA completed its “scrub” of the intercept tapes and found that, according to former CIA deputy director for intelligence Robert M. Gates, “the story might be a little more complicated.” The new NSA-produced translation showed that the Russians thought they were tracking an American RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft, not a Boeing 747 airliner, and that Major Osipovich, the SU-15 pilot who fired the fatal missiles, never identified the aircraft as a civilian airliner, believing that the “bogey” he was trailing was actually an American military aircraft. All of this information ended up in the next day’s edition of the CIA’s President’s Daily Brief, as well as in a briefing for the National Security Council by CIA director William Casey.18

  Everyone is familiar with the age-old adage “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” That is exactly what Reagan administration officials did. On September 5, President Reagan went on national television and delivered a harsh and uncompromising attack on Moscow’s actions, describing the KAL 007 shootdown as a “crime against humanity.” He played carefully selected extracts of the NSA intercepts, then forcefully argued that the Russian fighter pilot must have known that he was shooting down a civilian airliner despite the fact that he had been told four days earlier that the tapes indicated otherwise. The next day, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, played three carefully selected extracts from the NSA tapes before astanding-room-only session of the U.N. Security Council, again using the occasion to accuse the Soviets of having committed mass murder.19

  The crux of the problem was that Reagan’s and Kirkpatrick’s presentations were only half true. Gates later admitted that much of what they had said was not entirely factual, writing in his memoirs that “the administration’s rhetoric outran the facts known to it.”20Alvin Snyder, the former head of television for the U.S. Information Agency, whose staff was given the job of producing the slick audio-video presentation given by Ambassador Kirkpatrick at the United Nations, later admitted that he was given only selected portions of the NSA intercept tapes. He only learned later that the complete, unabridged version of the NSA intercept tape showed that the Russians had tried to warn the Korean airliner by firing tracer bullets in front of the aircraft, but the Korean pilots never saw them.21

  The fact that the Reagan administration played “fast and loose” with the NSA intelligence product only became known years later. According to Raymond Garthoff, a respected Soviet affairs analyst with the Brookings Institute in Washington,

  Secretary Shultz’s statement had been made as soon as American intelligence had ascertained beyond any doubt that the airplane had been shot down. Unfortunately, many of the allegations about the incident made by him, by President Reagan, and by other administration spokesmen even days later were based on unfounded assumptions or incorrect information. It later became clear that, contrary to the confident American charges, the Soviets had not known that it was a civilian airliner and indeed had believed (as shown in other taped interceptions not played by the President) that it was an American military reconnaissance aircraft. Moreover, the U.S. government had information on the real situation before these inaccurate charges were hastily made—although at least in some cases not known by those who made them . . . The facts were not important; what was important was the opportunity to savage the Soviet leaders.22

  At Fort Meade, NSA officials were furious about how their intelligence information was being abused. The White House’s selective release of the most salacious of the NSA material concerning the shootdown set off a firestorm of criticism inside NSA. Among the most vociferous of the critics was Walter Dee-ley, NSA’s deputy director for communications security, who before he died in 1989 said that “releasing the KAL material just for propaganda purposes cost us sources and gained nothing tangible in the long run.” Former NSA director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman agreed that the release of the tapes was counterproductive because it irretrievably broke down the wall of secrecy that had long surrounded NSA’s operations, but he understood why some NSA officials chose to talk to reporters about the KAL incident because “they were so offended by the way they thought that material had been used for political purposes.”23

  Arguably the most significant revelation coming out of the KAL 007 shoot-down was the fact that the massive Soviet national air defense system had not performed well at all. Intercepts showed that the Soviet’s radar tracking data had been inaccurate, and that the data had not been transmitted in a timely manner from the radar stations to the Russian air defense command centers in the Far East. The intercepts also showed that Soviet fighter interceptors did not respond quickly, repeatedly failing to intercept the lumbering 747 airliner as it slowly traversed the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island. The normally staid and tightly disciplined Soviet command and control system degenerated into something bordering on chaos. Intercepted air-to-ground radio messages between Osipovich and his ground controller on Sakhalin Island revealed conflicting instructions being radioed from the ground. According to a declassified CIA report, “The pilot [Osipovich] was agitated and clearly indicated that he considered this instruction to be belated. ‘It should have been earlier. How can I chase it? I’m already alongside the target.’ ”24

  Lebanon

  On August 25, 1982, U.S. Navy landing craft deposited eight hundred marine combat troops on the beaches of Beirut. Their mission was to supervise the evacuation of PLO forces from Lebanon, along with military contingents from France and Italy. The marines stayed only sixteen days in Beirut, but were forced to return on September 29 after President-elect Bashir Gemayel was killed when a car bomb destroyed his headquarters in East Beirut. In the days that followed, Israeli forces took advantage of the chaos that ensued and captured most of West Beirut. In East Beirut, Lebanese Christian militia forces besieged and eventually captured the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, massacring hundreds of Palestinians.

  A truce was hastily worked out, and the Israeli forces withdrew from Beirut. In order to protect a fragile cease-fire between Druze and Shi’ite Muslim militias and the Christian-dominated Lebanese army, the American and Euro pean forces stayed in Lebanon. The militias soon concluded that the U.S. forces were allied with the Lebanese army, and soon the marines came under fire as Muslim forces attacked the weakened Lebanese army troops guarding Beirut.

  The marines had SIGINT support from their own Second Radio Battalion, which set up a listening post in Yarze, a town located in the Christian-controlled zone southeast of the city. During the next year and a half, the marine SIGINT detachment monitored the command nets of the various Palestinian factions around Beirut, as well as the radio communications of the Shi’ite Amal and Druze militias. On May 6, 1983, the marine SIGINT operators at Yarze intercepted an order being sent to a Druze artillery battery to shell the Beirut International Airport, where U.S. Marine ground forces were deployed. Fortunately, the artillery strike never took place, but the marines at the airport were placed on a higher state of alert because of the intercepts.25

  But the fatal blow came from the Irani ans, who had a large presence in Lebanon that was actively planning and financing attacks on American targets there. NSA was routinely decoding the secret ca
bles sent from Tehran to Ali Akbar Mohtashami-Pur, the Irani an ambassador in Damascus, Syria, in which they repeatedly urged him to find ways to attack American targets in Lebanon. Most ominous were NSA decrypts revealing that the radical Shi’ite group Hezbollah in Lebanon routinely reported on its activities to Mohtashami-Pur, and that some (but not all) Hezbollah activities in Lebanon were directly controlled by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and the Ira -ni an Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran.26

  NSA intercepts of Mohtashami-Pur’s communications traffic revealed that the Irani ans were providing financial and logistical support to a group of Shi’ite terrorists in the Bekaa Valley. On April 18, 1983, a member of this group drove a nondescript van next to the U.S. embassy in Beirut and detonated a bomb consisting of two thousand pounds of high explosives, killing sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans. Among the casualties were most of the staff of the embassy’s CIA station, including the CIA’s top Middle East expert, Robert Ames, and the CIA station chief, Kenneth Haas. Decrypted Irani an diplomatic cables showed that Mohtashami-Pur had been aware that an attack was being planned, that senior Irani an intelligence officials in Tehran had approved the attack, and that Tehran had transferred twenty-five thousand dollars to the Irani an embassy in Damascus to finance the operation. Other NSA intercepts showed that the Irani an government had sent one million dollars to the embassy in Damascus, which was used to buy the explosives used in the car bomb attack.27

  Five months later, on September 24, an NSA listening post in the Middle East intercepted a message from the headquarters of MOIS in Tehran to Mohtashami-Pur in Damascus, directing the ambassador to “contact Hussein Musawi, the leader of the terrorist group Islamic Amal, and to instruct him . . . ‘to take a spectacular action against the United States Marines.’ ” The intercept did not, however, provide any specifics about the time and place of the planned attack. On September 27, NSA sent an urgent warning message to the White House, the CIA stations in Beirut and Damascus, and the Second Marine Radio Battalion SIGINT detachment in Lebanon, indicating that a terrorist attack might be mounted against the United States in the near future. 28

  But amazingly, neither the Pentagon nor the commander of the U.S. Marine contingent in Beirut, Colonel Timothy Geraghty, seems to have reacted to this warning, which may well have gotten lost in the maze of the U.S. military’s bureaucracy. We do know that Geraghty did not put his forces on alert, nor did he or any of his subordinate commanders take any additional mea-sures to ensure the safety of their troops. Senior officials at the Pentagon also did nothing to prevent the attack. Less than a month later, the disaster that NSA had warned was coming finally came to pass.29

  At six twenty-two a.m. on October 23, a terrorist named Ismalal Ascari drove a yellow Mercedes-Benz truck laden with explosives into the marine barracks complex at the Beirut International Airport and detonated it. The resulting explosion was massive, the equivalent of twenty thousand pounds of TNT detonating, giving it the sorrowful distinction of being the largest nonnuclear explosion in history. The casualty toll was appalling. When the body count was finally tallied, 241 marines and sailors were dead and 60 more badly wounded. Twenty seconds after the first attack, a second suicide bomber attempted to drive a truck laden with explosives into the nearby headquarters of the French peacekeeping force in Beirut. Although alert French sentries killed the driver, the bomb detonated, killing 58 French soldiers.30

  After the bombing of the marine barracks, NSA unleashed the full range of its SIGINT assets on the Muslim militias now openly firing on the marine positions at the airport. Air force and navy SIGINT aircraft orbited over the Mediterranean twenty-four hours a day intercepting Druze, Shi’ite, and Syrian military radio traffic. SIGINT from the marine detachment at Bayt Miri began to be used for offensive purposes. Intercepts and direction-finding data from the Second Radio Battalion detachment were used to direct marine artillery and naval gunfire to the locations of artillery batteries and their firing-direction centers, manned by Druze gunners belonging to Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), in the hills above Beirut.31

  Interviews with marine SIGINTers who served in Lebanon between 1982 and 1984 reveal that the problems experienced by the SIGINT detachment from the Second Radio Battalion in Beirut were huge. Not only had NSA not briefed the personnel of the marine SIGINT detachment about the signals environment in Lebanon before they deployed to Beirut, but the agency also did not provide them with any working aids or computerized databases related to the targets they were being tasked with copying. And once they arrived in Lebanon, they discovered that they did not have any access to NSA’s databases, nor were they given copies of reports detailing what NSA was learning about the situation in Lebanon from its other SIGINT sources. But the biggest shock was the discovery, once they got to Beirut, that they were not properly equipped to conduct SIGINT operations in the low-tech signals environment that was Beirut. A former marine SIGINT operator stationed in Lebanon recalled, “We were trained and equipped to intercept conventional Soviet military radio communications, not the walkie-talkies used by the Shi’ites and Druze in the foothills overlooking our base . . . Initially we couldn’t hear shit.” The Shi’ite and Druze militiamen who were their principal targets did not use fixed radio frequencies or regular call signs, or follow standardized radio procedures, which made monitoring their communications extremely difficult. The differing Arabic dialects spoken by the militiamen were also extremely hard for the school-trained marine intercept operators to understand, as was the West Beirut street slang the militiamen used. Taken together, this meant that the marine radio intercept operators and analysts had to improvise (oftentimes under fire) to do their job. A former marine SIGINT detachment commander recalled, “It was a hell of a way to learn your job, but that’s what Marines are good at. Adapt and improvise. I just wish we didn’t have to. So many lives were lost because we weren’t prepared for the enemy that we faced.”32

  General Odom at NSA: April 1985–August 1988

  NSA’s increasingly close relations with the White House infuriated Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and his deputy, William Taft IV, who wanted to reestablish Defense Department control over the agency, which some Pentagon officials had begun to view as a “rogue elephant.” This battle for control of NSA came to a head when agency director Faurer and Taft disagreed over NSA’s role as national manager for telephone and computer security pursuant to National Security Decision Directive 145, particularly draft provisions that would have placed NSA under the authority of the NSC, not the Defense Department. Although NSA won this battle, the worst was yet to come. During budget negotiations before the Defense Resources Board in late 1984, Faurer hotly disputed a plan by the Defense Department to cut the part of NSA’s funding earmarked for a large computer complex called the Supercomputing Research Center. Faurer appealed the board’s decision in a memorandum to Secretary Weinberger and sent copies of the memo to several NSA allies at the White House. When Taft learned of this end run, he called Faurer into his office on January 3, 1985, for a meeting that was subsequently described as heated and acrimonious. Faurer was brusquely informed that he was through as NSA director. CIA director William Casey tried to intervene on his behalf, but to no avail. Faurer submitted his letter of resignation on March 19 and left NSA on April 1.33

  On April 19, President Reagan nominated Lieutenant General William Odom, of the U.S. Army, to succeed Faurer as NSA director. Odom became NSA’s eleventh director on May 8, the first army officer to head the agency since Lieutenant General Marshall Carter in 1969.34

  Born in Cookeville, Tennessee, on June 23, 1932, Odom grew up in the nearby tiny farming community of Crossville, where his father ran an agricultural research station for the University of Tennessee. Odom graduated from West Point in 1954, and after several years as a platoon and company commander he obtained a master’s degree in Russian studies from Columbia University, in 1962. From this point onward, most of Odo
m’s career was spent in either academia or intelligence. He taught at West Point from 1966 to 1969, then earned a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia in 1970. Following graduation, he served a tour in Vietnam with the CIA-led pacification organization Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, then went to Moscow as the assistant military attaché, a position he held from April 1972 to June 1974. Following an assignment teaching political science at West Point, Odom served on the NSC as the military assistant to Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, from 1977 to 1981, where he handled matters relating to crisis management, nuclear targeting, civil defense, terrorism, and third world military planning. His hard-line attitude toward the Soviet Union earned him the sobriquet Zbig’s Super-hawk during his tour in the White House. From November 1981 to April 1985, Odom served as the army’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence, where he promoted technical intelligence collection systems. Odom was also instrumental in saving the army’s controversial clandestine intelligence unit, the Intelligence Support Activity, from extinction.35

  Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward described Odom, perhaps politely, as “an intense, thin, stony man.” Former NSA officials frequently used the words “acerbic,” “fractious,” “combative,” and “hardheaded” in interviews to describe his personality, along with more colorful descriptions that cannot be printed here.36