The Secret Sentry

by Matthew M. Aid

  Given these descriptions, it should come as no surprise that Odom’s tenure as NSA director, from 1985 to 1988, was not a happy one. In a matter of months, he dismantled virtually all of the internal reform mechanisms put in place by former director Bobby Ray Inman, including the system designed to identify and promote talented managers. Commenting on this, Inman said, “I think much of it [the reform initiatives] died with Bill Odom, who had his strong likes and dislikes and zero interest in systems.”37

  A polarizing figure, Odom had an autocratic style that instantly put him at odds with many of NSA’s senior civilian officials. There were resignations by key senior personnel and a minirevolt in 1988 after Odom’s censure and demotion of the number-three man in NSA’s Communications Security Organization, John Wobensmith, for assisting Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, which was regarded as making Wobensmith the scapegoat for the agency’s involvement in North’s Iran-Contra scheme.38By mid-1988, many of Inman’s protégés were fighting what they regarded as a purge of their ranks by Odom and his supporters. Things got so bad that Inman actually testified against Odom’s actions at a personnel hearing at Fort Meade.39

  Odom made few friends in Washington and plenty of enemies because of his lobbying to increase the independence and power of NSA at the expense of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which were already concerned about the burgeoning power of NSA. When CIA director Casey was told that Odom had been spotted on Capitol Hill leaving the office of a senator on the intelligence committee, Casey erupted in anger, telling one of his deputies, “This S.O.B. is incredible!”40

  The Spy Satellites

  NSA’s SIGINT effort against the USSR during the 1980s was radically improved by a constellation of four new spy satellites parked in geosynchronous orbit twenty-two thousand miles above the earth called Vortex (previously known as Chalet), which was designed to suck up a huge amount of Russian communications traffic. Vortex was created in the early 1970s to replace the older Canyon as NSA’s primary means of intercepting vast quantities of telephone traffic deep inside the Soviet Union. Sporting a huge parabolic receiving antenna, the eleven-foot long, eight-foot wide, 3,087-pound Vortex satellites were equipped with state-of-the-art intercept receivers that had the capacity to simultaneously intercept over eleven thousand telephone calls and faxes carried on Soviet microwave radio-relay circuits; the satellites then chose which signals to beam back to NSA-operated mission ground stations at Men with Hill, in northern England, and Bad Aibling, in West Germany, in near real time based on a sophisticated “watch list” maintained by its onboard computers.41

  The quantity and quality of intelligence coming from the Vortex satellites was impressive. Vortex intercepted to great effect the operational and tactical radio traffic of Soviet military forces deep inside Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, and it monitored the radio circuits used by Russian SS-20 mobile intermediate-range ballistic missile firing units and SS-24 mobile ICBM batteries to communicate with their operating bases. The best intelligence coverage of the April 1986 disaster at the Russian Chernobyl nuclear reactor available to the U.S. intelligence community came from intercepts supplied by Vortex satellites, which listened in on the Russian government’s reaction to the disaster, including the telephone traffic of the Soviet general staff and the KGB. Two years later, in May 1988, a Vortex satellite picked up radio traffic indicating that a huge explosion had taken place at a Russian fuel propellant plant at Pavlograd, which made fuel components for Soviet ICBMs.42

  Ronald Pelton

  Arguably the worst damage that has ever been inflicted on NSA was not done by an enterprising journalist or a White House official leaking information. Rather, this dubious honor is held by a former NSA official named Ronald Pelton, who had worked in NSA’s A Group, which was responsible for all SIGINT operations against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, for his entire career. As chief of a key staff unit within A Group, Pelton had complete access to the details of all the unit’s sensitive compartmented programs.

  In July 1979, Pelton was forced to resign from NSA after filing for bankruptcy three months earlier. Desperate for money, on January 15, 1980, Pelton got in touch with the Russian embassy in Washington, and in the months that followed, he sold them, for a paltry thirty-five thousand dollars, a number of Top Secret Codeword documents and anything else he could remember. For the Soviets this was pure gold, and a bargain at that.43

  The damage that Pelton did was massive. He compromised the joint NSA– U.S. Navy undersea-cable tapping operation in the Sea of Okhotsk called Ivy Bells, which was producing vast amounts of enormously valuable, unencrypted, and incredibly detailed intelligence about the Soviet Pacific Fleet, information that might give the United States a clear, immediate warning of a Soviet attack. In 1981, a Soviet navy salvage ship lifted the Ivy Bells pod off the seafloor and took it to Moscow to be studied by Soviet electronics experts. It now resides in a forlorn corner of the museum of the Russian security service in the Lubyanka, in downtown Moscow.44

  Even worse, Pelton betrayed virtually every sensitive SIGINT operation that NSA and Britain’s GCHQ were then conducting against the Soviet Union, including the seven most highly classified compartmented intelligence operations that A Group was then engaged in. The programs were so sensitive that Charles Lord, the NSA deputy director of operations at the time, called them the “Holiest of Holies.” He told the Russians about the ability of NSA’s Vortex SIGINT satellites to intercept sensitive communications deep inside the USSR that were being carried by microwave radio-relay systems. Pelton also revealed the full extent of the intelligence being collected by the joint NSA-CIA Broadside listening post in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Within months of Pelton being debriefed in Vienna, the Soviets intensified their jamming of the frequencies being monitored by the Moscow embassy listening post, and the intelligence “take” coming out of Broadside fell to practically nothing. Pelton also told the Russians about virtually every Russian cipher machine that NSA’s cryptanalysts in A Group had managed to crack in the late 1970s. NSA analysts had wondered why at the height of the Polish crisis in 1981 they had inexplicably lost their ability to exploit key Soviet and Polish communications systems, which had suddenly gone silent without warning. Pelton also told the Russians about a joint CIA-NSA operation wherein CIA operatives placed fake tree stumps containing sophisticated electronic eavesdropping devices near Soviet military installations around Moscow. The data intercepted by these devices was either relayed electronically to the U.S. embassy or sent via burst transmission to the United States via communication satellites.45

  In December 1985, Pelton was arrested and charged in federal court in Baltimore, with six counts of passing classified information to the Soviet Union. After a brief trial, in June 1986 Pelton was found guilty and sentenced to three concurrent life terms in prison.46

  Gulf of Sidra II and La Belle Disco

  The year 1986 was one of dangerous confrontation between Muammar Qaddafi and the Reagan administration. In January, the U.S. Sixth Fleet’s Freedom of Navigation exercises off the Libyan coast (designated Operation Attain Document) gave NSA an opportunity to monitor the reactions of Libyan MiG-23 and MiG-25 fighters. On January 13, two MiG-25s attempted to intercept a U.S. Navy EA-3 SIGINT reconnaissance aircraft flying over international waters southwest of Sicily. The Libyan aircraft retreated when a pair of navy F-18 fighters from the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea arrived on the scene.47

  A month later, on February 28, the Joint Chiefs of Staff requested NSA SIGINT support for enlarged navy exercises in the Gulf of Sidra, a move sure to produce a violent Libyan reaction. Pursuant to the request, NSA quickly reallocated otherwise dedicated resources for monitoring Libyan military communications traffic, among them one of the Vortex SIGINT satellites, a number of navy warships with embarked SIGINT intercept detachments, and a number of air force and navy SIGINT reconnaissance aircraft. In March, the increased tempo of American reconnaissance flights triggered an attempted intercept by two L
ibyan MiG-25s of a navy EA-3B reconnaissance aircraft flying from the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga 120 miles north of Tripoli. No shots were fired, but it became clear that the Libyans were serious about stopping American eavesdropping activities.48

  Since NSA could read the Libyan cipher systems, the agency knew virtually everything worth knowing about the capabilities and locations of Libyan air and ground units, including the Libyan air defense system’s radar and fire control systems. In early 1986, NSA learned that Qaddafi had ordered his tiny navy out onto the high seas to avoid being destroyed in port and had told his air force to increase the number of sorties being flown. But Libyan warships were prone to mechanical difficulties caused by poor maintenance, their crews were hindered by a lack of blue-water experience, and there were also operational difficulties, including an inability to replenish and refuel ships at sea. And the Libyan air force, NSA discovered, had serious problems operating its complex Russian-made fighters. Nevertheless, NSA monitored more than two hundred sorties by Libyan fighter aircraft trying to engage their more capable U.S. Navy counterparts over the Gulf of Sidra. An air force radio intercept operator at Iráklion, Crete, later recalled that “a fistfight with Qaddafi was coming. It was just a matter of when and where.”49

  On March 23, a Libyan SA-5 SAM battery launched four missiles at U.S. Navy aircraft that had deliberately flown across Qaddafi’s so-called Line of Death over the Gulf of Sidra. The missile launch was detected by a U.S. Air Force RC-135 Burning Wind reconnaissance aircraft, which warned the navy fighters in time for them to do evasive maneuvers. The next day, U.S. Navy fighter-bombers destroyed the Libyan SAM battery and two Libyan guided missile patrol boats.50

  Qaddafi demanded retaliation for the humiliation visited on his forces. On March 25, an NSA listening post intercepted a three-line telex message from the head of the Libyan Intelligence Service in Tripoli to eight Libyan embassies (called “People’s Bureaus”) in Europe, including East Berlin, instructing them to target places in which American servicemen congregated. An intercepted March 23 message from Tripoli to the People’s Bureau in East Berlin had demanded an attack “with as many victims as possible.” This was followed by an intercepted message from East Berlin reporting that “an operation would be undertaken shortly and that Libyan officials would be pleased with it.”

  At one forty-nine a.m. on April 5, a bomb went off inside La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, killing two American servicemen and a Turkish woman and wounding 230 others. Shortly after, an intercepted message from Libya’s East Berlin outpost reported that “the operation had been successfully completed, and that it would not be traceable to the Libyan diplomatic post in East Berlin.” According to the files of the former East German secret service, the intercepted message stated, “At 1:30 this morning one of the acts was carried out with success, without leaving a trace behind.”51

  On the evening of April 7, President Reagan went on national tele vision to announce that the U.S. government had incontrovertible evidence proving that the Libyan government was behind the La Belle Disco bombing. The Libyans immediately changed all of their codes and ciphers and purchased a new cipher machine from a Swiss company, negating many of NSA’s gains made since the first Libyan cipher systems were solved in 1979.52

  On April 14, eighteen U.S. Air Force F-111 fighter-bombers took off from air bases in En gland for a twenty-four-hundred-mile flight to bomb targets in Libya. The American air strikes hit selected targets in Tripoli and Benghazi, killing at least fifteen people, including Qaddafi’s adopted daughter, and wounding more than one hundred others. But they did not succeed in killing Qaddafi.53

  Admiral William Studeman, who would become director of NSA two years later, recalled that the entire intelligence community was scooped by CNN: “When we bombed Libya . . . we got more bomb damage assessments and a sense of what was going on inside Tripoli around those targets listening to the CNN guy talking on the balcony of a hotel in Tripoli than we did from all the electronic surveillance devices that we had focused on the problem.”54

  Admiral William Studeman: August 1988–January 1992

  On August 1, 1988, General Odom retired from the military after the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously recommended against extending his three-year tour of duty as director of NSA. Despite support from the Pentagon’s number-two man, William Taft, Odom’s abrasive personality and autocratic style had rubbed too many people in the Defense Department and the intelligence community the wrong way.55

  Odom was replaced by career naval intelligence officer Rear Admiral William Studeman. Bill Studeman was born in Brownsville, Texas, on January 16, 1940, the son of an American aviation pioneer who had flown during World War I and helped build Pan American Airways. He graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1962 with a B.A. in history, then joined the navy to become a pilot. Studeman’s subsequent advance through the navy’s ranks was meteoric, taking him from ensign to rear admiral in only twenty years. His big break came when he was assigned to be the executive assistant to the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Inman took Studeman under his wing and helped guide him through the ranks of naval intelligence. In September 1985, he became the fifty-third director of ONI and remained there until his assignment as director of NSA.56

  Quiet and thoughtful, during his career in the navy Studeman had earned a reputation for blunt honesty and candor that had occasionally bruised some of his colleagues in naval intelligence, some of whom derisively referred to him as “the Boy Scout.” It had fallen to Studeman, as director of ONI, to deal with the fallout of the Walker-Whitworth spy ring, which he had handled with aplomb despite the fact that it was arguably the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history before the 2002 Iraqi weapons of mass destruction scandal.57

  He was pleasantly surprised to get the nod to head NSA. Former agency officials who served under him believe that Studeman’s three-year tenure there is under appreciated. He is credited with “righting the ship” after Odom’s bruising and contentious tenure, restoring the shaken morale at the agency, and renewing NSA’s sense of purpose and mission at a time when it needed it most.58

  And most important, the agency was regarded as far more effective by its consumers after scoring some important intelligence coups, such as information concerning the Chinese military’s bloody suppression of the democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Intercepts collected by NSA detailed the reluctance of the commander of the Chinese Thirty-eighth Army in Beijing to attack the student protesters camped out in the square. When the Thirty-eighth Army would not move, SIGINT tracked the Chinese Twenty-seventh Army and the elite parachute divisions of the Fifteenth Air Army being brought into Beijing to put down the student-led movement. The intercepts confirmed that units of the Twenty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Armies had clashed with each other and that casualties had been sustained by both forces. The clandestine listening posts inside the American, British, Australian, and Canadian embassies also showed that the Chinese army had deployed forces around the Zhongmanhai Leadership Compound in Beijing to protect the Chinese Politburo.59

  Then, in December 1989, SIGINT coming out of the joint NSA-CIA listening post inside the U.S. embassy in Bucharest proved to be vitally important during the military coup d’état that overthrew Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaussescu. According to the late Ambassador Warren Zimmermann, once the coup began, “the CIA station started giving the ambassador intercepts which were of course, tremendously valuable to letting him make up his mind about how the coup was going and the direction it was going in and what would happen to Ceaussescu.”60

  Operation Just Cause: The Invasion of Panama

  In the late 1980s, relations between the United States and the Panamanian regime led by Manuel Noriega, formerly the darling of the Reagan and Bush administrations, deteriorated rapidly. In June 1987, the chief of staff of the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) publicly accused Noriega of having engaged in dr
ug trafficking and other assorted criminal enterprises. In 1988, Noriega was indicted by a federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, for narcotics trafficking. As a result of the increasing tension between the United States and Panama, NSA was ordered to intensify its intelligence coverage of the country beginning in 1988, but this effort was hampered by the fact that Noriega had constructed a secure internal communications system, which NSA could not penetrate. Making matters even worse, as a 1994 paper written by a U.S. Army intelligence officer later revealed, Noriega’s frequent purges of the PDF officer corps, which removed dozens of unreliable men from command positions, “had eliminated most of SOUTHCOM’s [U.S. Southern Command’s] and the CIA’s HUMINT capability.” Events continued to spin out of control during 1988 and 1989. In March 1988, there was an unsuccessful coup attempt to oust Noriega. In April 1989, a CIA operative in Panama was arrested. The following month, Noriega won a rigged national election. This was followed by another unsuccessful coup attempt in October 1989. By the late fall of 1989, U.S. intelligence resources, including those of NSA, were heavily committed to closely monitoring events in Panama.61

  When the United States invaded Panama on December 20, 1989 (an action designated Operation Just Cause), NSA had been providing intelligence to its customers through a special “Panama Cell.”62The agency’s primary target was Noriega, who proved to be an elusive target, moving around “many times during the day and night” and sending “false radio and telephone traffic to further conceal his whereabouts.” On December 19, the day before the invasion was due to begin, NSA lost Noriega because, according to a report written by an army intelligence officer, he “took an unexpected trip to Torrijos/Tocumen airport to visit one of his prostitutes.” NSA informed the U.S. Army Ranger battalion whose mission it was to capture Noriega of the latest information, but the intelligence came too late. According to the report, the rangers “missed him by the narrowest of margins.”63