As it turned out, Noriega’s sudden disappearance may well have been due to a warning he had just received. While Noriega was visiting Colón, NSA intercepted a telephone call from an unknown person in Washington to Noriega warning him that, according to a State Department source, the United States was about to invade Panama. At ten p.m. on December 19, shortly before the invasion, NSA intercept operators listened as the radio station servicing the PDF general staff in Panama City began urgently transmitting messages to all Panamanian military units, warning them that the U.S. invasion was to start in three hours. The warning message ordered all troops to “report to their barracks, draw weapons and prepare to fight.” Looking at the intercept, the commander of the American assault force, Lieutenant General Carl Stiner, advanced the time that the attack was to begin by fifteen minutes in the hope that he would be able to achieve some degree of surprise, but resistance from PDF forces was still heavier than expected.64
Postscript
The 1980s saw NSA grow from more than fifty thousand military and civilian personnel to seventy-five thousand in 1989, twenty-five thousand of whom worked at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. In terms of manpower alone, the agency was the largest component of the U.S. intelligence community by far, with a headquarters staff larger than the entire CIA.65
As the agency’s size grew at a staggering pace, so did the importance of its intelligence reporting. The amount of reporting produced by NSA during the 1980s was astronomical. According to former senior American intelligence officials, on some days during the 1980s SIGINT accounted for over 70 percent of the material contained in the CIA’s daily intelligence report to President Reagan. 66 Former CIA director (now Secretary of Defense) Robert Gates stated, “The truth is, until the late 1980s, U.S. signals intelligence was way out in front of the rest of the world.”67
But NSA’s SIGINT efforts continued to produce less information because of a dramatic increase in worldwide telecommunications traffic volumes, which NSA had great difficulty coping with. It also had to deal with the growing availability and complexity of new telecommunications technologies, such as cheaper and more sophisticated encryption systems. By the late 1980s, the number of intercepted messages flowing into NSA headquarters at Fort Meade had increased to the point that the agency’s staff and computers were only able to process about 20 percent of the incoming materials.68These developments were to come close to making NSA deaf, dumb, and blind in the decade that followed.
CHAPTER 11
Troubles in Paradise From Desert Storm to the War on Terrorism
The surest guarantee of disappointment is an unrealistic expectation.
—THOMAS PATRICK CARROLL
For NSA, the 1990s started with a resounding explosion and ended with a barely discernible whimper. 1989 will forever be remembered as the year that marked the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist regimes in Eastern Eu rope. In an event that most people alive at the time remember well, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, and what was left of the shell-shocked East German government succumbed and allowed its people to leave the country for the first time. By June 1, 1990, the Berlin Wall had ceased to exist and all crossing points between East and West Berlin had been opened. Four months later, East and West Germany were united as a single country on October 1. Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev radically changed course and adopted perestroika and glasnost as the bywords of his government. Gorbachev’s reforms set forth a chain reaction of events that were to dramatically change the face of the world. Over the next two years, all Soviet troops were withdrawn from Eastern Eu rope, the Warsaw Pact was disbanded, all Eastern Euro pe an nations became democracies, and the Soviet Union disintegrated into sixteen separate countries. In the blink of an eye, the Cold War was over, and with it, all of NSA’s principal targets since the end of World War II vanished. But despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was to be no respite for NSA.1
Desert Storm
The invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein caught the U.S. intelligence community by surprise once again. In a familiar but worrisome pattern, intelligence indicating the possibility of the invasion was not properly analyzed or was discounted by senior Bush administration officials, including then–secretary of defense Dick Cheney, who did not think that Hus-sein would be foolish enough to do it. General Lee Butler, the commander of the Strategic Air Command, was later quoted as saying, “We had the warning from the intelligence community— we refused to acknowledge it.”2
It took five months for the United States to move resources by land and sea to implement Desert Storm’s ground attack by three hundred thousand coalition troops. The operation began at three a.m. Baghdad time on January 17, 1991, with a massive series of air strikes and cruise missile attacks. The air campaign lasted thirty-eight days, battering the Iraqi military into a state of submission. On February 24, the much-anticipated ground offensive was launched. One hundred hours later, the war was over. President George H. W. Bush, who had no intention of “driving on to Baghdad,” declared a cease-fire on February 27, and the Iraqi forces signed a formal agreement for cessation of hostilities on March 3.
Operation Desert Storm was a military victory of historic proportions— one whose like would probably never be seen again. In the span of only forty-three days, forty-two Iraqi combat divisions were destroyed and 82,000 prisoners taken, the entire Iraqi navy was sunk, and 50 percent of Iraq’s combat aircraft were destroyed or fled to Iran to avoid destruction. The total number of Iraqi dead and wounded, including civilians, will probably never be known.3The cease-fire proved to be premature; despite the annihilation of Iraq’s navy and combat aircraft, significant remnants of its military, including the Republican Guard, were never destroyed.
However, the crushing victory by U.S. and coalition forces would not have been possible without the benefit of NSA’s flood of intelligence, which was particularly successful in helping to neutralize the huge Iraqi air defense system— over 700 radars, almost 3,700 SAMs, and 970 antiaircraft artillery sites spread throughout Iraq and occupied Kuwait, which was denser than the Soviet air defenses on the Kola Peninsula at the height of the Cold War. In the five-month interval after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, NSA’s SIGINT satellites, ground-based listening posts, and reconnaissance aircraft mapped the locations of all Iraqi SAM sites, radar stations, and command centers, analyzed the system’s capability— and figured out how the system worked and how to defeat it. Within hours of the initial attack against it, the system was reduced to rubble, giving the coalition unchallenged air supremacy.4
Most of the Iraqi command-and-control targets hit during the air campaign were based on SIGINT information. NSA coverage of Iraqi government and military strategic communications helped the U.S. Air Force to target virtually all key radio stations and fiber-optic communications nodes inside Iraq and Kuwait. The monthlong air strikes, according to future NSA director Rear Admiral John “Mike” McConnell, “prevented communications up and down the Iraqi chain of command and contributed to the confusion and lack of cohesion among Iraqi ground forces as co alition ground forces moved into Kuwait and Iraq.”5
But four sites were spared— ones that the surviving Iraqi commanders in Kuwait would be forced to use to communicate with their superiors in Basra and Baghdad. The gamble succeeded. An army intelligence history notes, “Just before the ground war [began] allied intelligence agencies . . . left four [signal nodes] intact . . . leading to valuable NSA intercepts which, in conjunction with JSTARS [the army radar surveillance aircraft], brought into view a vivid picture of their movements and intentions.”6
NSA’s interception of messages to and from Nazar Hamdoon, Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, showed that Hussein really believed his army could inflict heavy losses on the allied forces and repel any attempt to liberate Kuwait. The intercepts also revealed that Hussein refused to concede defeat until virtually the end of the war, suggesting to American intelligence analysts
that the Iraqi dictator was delusional and/or operating in an information vacuum.7
But many senior American intelligence officials and military commanders found NSA’s performance disappointing. First, the agency was unable to gain access to the communications of the Iraqi army and Republican Guard in Kuwait and southern Iraq until the very end of the war because of tight and doggedly maintained Iraqi communications security discipline until the air offensive began on January 17—to the extent that Iraqi commanders were “even pronouncing death sentences for those who used two-way radios or telephones.” 8 Not even the Russians had been able to maintain such discipline at the height of the Cold War. As a result, the Iraqis effectively neutralized much of NSA and the U.S. military’s ability to collect intelligence on enemy forces before and during Desert Storm.9According to David McManis, NSA’s representative at the Pentagon during the war, Hussein “learned what his vulnerabilities were, and, boy, I’ll tell you he’s played it right. We’ve never faced a tougher partner in terms of [SIGINT] access.”10
SIGINT did not become a significant factor in the ground war until it began on February 24, when the Iraqis hurriedly began redeploying their elite Republican Guard divisions from their reserve positions to face the U.S. and allied invasion force. This meant that they had to stop using their buried land-lines. After that, NSA’s SIGINT intercept operators had a field day. For example, NSA provided critical intelligence about the movements of three key Republican Guard divisions on February 26, which revealed that the commander of the Iraqi Third Corps had ordered his units to withdraw as rapidly as possible from Kuwait, a withdrawal that quickly turned into a rout.11
The greatest threat, at least psychologically, was presented by the limited-range Iraqi Scud missiles, which after the invasion of Kuwait were dispersed to presurveyed bases throughout Iraq. On January 18, the day after the U.S. air campaign began, the Iraqi missile batteries began lobbing Scud at Israel and later at Saudi Arabia. While none hit any military targets, public anxiety in the United States and Israel about these attacks forced the White House to order NSA and U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) to dedicate a significant amount of their SIGINT collection resources to locating the missiles so that they could be destroyed by air strikes.12
This proved to be virtually impossible. A study written by a U.S. Army intelligence officer who served in Operation Desert Storm notes. “The quick nature of Iraqi ‘shoot and scoot’ tactics made detection extremely difficult, if not near impossible. The Iraqi missile units maintained excellent radio security, only infrequently communicating target data and fire commands with higher headquarters.” The net result was that SIGINT, despite intensive efforts, did not find a single Scud missile launcher during the entire Persian Gulf War.13
Because of the limited use of radio communications by the Iraqis, U.S. Army and Marine Corps tactical SIGINT collection units produced virtually no intelligence during the war, which came as a nasty shock to U.S. military intelligence officials. Moreover, army and marine field commanders below the corps level confirmed that they received no SIGINT support from NSA during Operation Desert Storm. Apart from onerous security limitations on the dissemination of SIGINT material to the commanders who needed it the most, NSA tried to disguise the SIGINT origins of what intelligence it did provide, and generated reports that were so chopped up that they were virtually useless.14
But the greatest problem for SIGINT was the perpetual shortage of Arabic linguists, which forced NSA and the U.S. military to grant emergency security clearances to a number of Iraqi Americans serving in the military when Kuwait was invaded and ship them to the Persian Gulf to become instant radio intercept operators. In addition, three hundred Kuwaiti students were recruited from U.S. universities. They were given a crash course in the rudiments of SIGINT collection, flown to Saudi Arabia wearing the uniforms of sergeants in the Kuwaiti army, and then parceled out to various U.S. Army SIGINT units in the region. The commander of all U.S. Army intelligence forces in the gulf later wrote of the service provided by these young Kuwaiti volunteers: “Their performance and contribution was magnificent and immeasur able . . . we couldn’t have done it without ’em.”15
The net result, however, was that in the opinion of senior military field commanders and intelligence officials who served in the Persian Gulf, SIGINT and HUMINT did not perform particularly well during Operation Desert Shield/Storm. Instead, photo reconnaissance satellites, unmanned reconnaissance drones (referred to within the military as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs), and airborne radar surveillance aircraft all proved to be more important to the successful prosecution of the war.16
Retrenchment and Debasement
Even before the defeat of Iraq was completed, back at Fort Meade NSA’s director, Admiral William Studeman, had become concerned that the health of his agency was not good. Declassified documents reveal that the stifling, multilay-ered NSA bureaucracy had been allowed to grow unchecked during the 1980s because the agency’s nominal watchdogs in the CIA, the Pentagon, and Congress had paid scant attention to what was going on, allowing the agency to become top-heavy and bloated. A February 1991 House intelligence committee report found “very limited internal oversight of Agency [NSA] programs,” as well as no supervision of the agency by either the Defense Department Inspector General’s Office or the congressional watchdog agency, the General Accountability Office (GAO).17A few months later, a report prepared by the Defense Department’s inspector general confirmed, “NSA did not have sufficient oversight mechanisms to ensure the Agency efficiently accomplished its mission.”18
An internal NSA study sent to Studeman before Iraq’s surrender noted, “The Agency is effective, but it is not efficient . . . This inefficiency may waste money; it may waste technology; but the task force is convinced that it is surely wasting people.” The agency’s vast bureaucracy was strangling it. The report’s key conclusion was this: “The Agency is in inchoate crisis, and if there is a single alarm to sound in this report, it is that the National Security Agency needs major fundamental change and needs it soon.”19
This came as a shock at a time when NSA not only was the largest American intelligence agency, but also presented itself as the best organized, the most efficient, and the producer of the best intelligence available.20The agency’s reputation inside the Bush White House and elsewhere in Washington had never been higher. But NSA was, in reality, a deeply troubled organization, suffering from a malaise that was very much of its own making.21
Shortly after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union, the rationale for maintaining a massive Cold War intelligence community was seen as questionable, and beginning in 1990, the Bush administration and Congress sharply cut the national intelligence budget. In late 1990, Studeman, faced with a shrinking bud get, was forced to order substantial staff cuts, which were implemented shortly after the end of Desert Storm.22
The agency began to retire hundreds of its employees, many of whom had decades of experience and represented an irreplaceable institutional memory. One former NSA official who took early retirement in 1992 recalled one of his colleagues telling him with great sadness at his retirement party, “The good old days are gone forever.”23
NSA’s rapidly shrinking budget and workforce meant that reforming its bureaucracy was not the agency’s top priority. In a 1994 study, an army intelligence officer noted, “Intelligence analysts must now consider an array of 160 nations and many other independent groups as separate entities without the simplicity of the East-West division.”24In order to use its stretched resources to deliver intelligence product to its customers, NSA’s two top priorities became (a) improving the quality of SIGINT support to the U.S. military and (b) maintaining NSA’s access to the communications of its growing global target base.25
But owing to bureaucratic bungling, mismanagement, and faulty leadership, over the next eight years not only did NSA fail to effect any meaningful reforms to its management and financial practices,
but it also failed to address the dramatic changes then taking place in global telecommunications technology. The agency’s morale plummeted and its mission suffered. NSA’s director of operations, James Taylor, wrote in a memo, “The mission should drive the budget process. In spite of our best efforts through the 1990s, the opposite has most often been the case. Our changes to deal with this have never gotten to the root of the problem. We have merely dressed up the problem in new clothes.”26
Making matters worse, NSA simply did not have the ability to effectively cover the plethora of newly created nations holding nuclear weapons, such as Belarus, the Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.27Many of the so-called rogue nation states, such as Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, were already closing off SIGINT access by shifting from radio circuits to buried landlines and fiber-optic cables.28
The worst threat to NSA’s fragile code-breaking capabilities came not from abroad but from a tiny computer software company in northern California called RSA Data Security, headed by Jim Bidzos. NSA was aware by the late 1980s that new encryption technologies being developed by private companies meant, according to a declassified internal NSA publication, that NSA’s code breakers were falling behind: “The underlying rate of cryptologic development throughout the world is faster than ever before and getting faster. Cryptologic literature in the public domain concerning advanced analytic techniques is proliferating. Inexpensive high-grade cryptographic equipment is readily accessible on the open market.”29The agency was still able to break the cipher systems used by a small number of key countries around the world, such as Libya and Iran, but this could change quickly as target nations began using commercially available and rapidly evolving encryption software packages. It would have a catastrophic impact on the agency’s code-breaking efforts.30
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