The Secret Sentry

by Matthew M. Aid

  In April 1992, Studeman stepped down as director of NSA to take the post of deputy director of the CIA. His last memorandum to the agency warned that given NSA’s continually shrinking resources, “target technology will be tough, and many outsiders will want to rationalize a reduced threat dimension in order to further decrement intelligence for alternative agendas. There will be a trend to de-emphasize technical intelligence in favor of cheaper and historically less productive intelligence means.” Studeman urged the agency to focus on “technical and operational innovation to deal with a changing and changed world . . . We cannot be layered, inefficient, bureaucratic, top heavy, isolated, or turf minded.” Sadly, Studeman’s warnings went largely unheeded, and his recommendations were not implemented by his successors. Six years after his departure, NSA was on the verge of going deaf, dumb, and blind.

  The McConnell Years at NSA: 1992–1996

  Admiral Studeman’s replacement as NSA’s director was another career navy intelligence officer, forty-eight-year-old Vice Admiral John “Mike” Mc-Connell. Born in Greenville, South Carolina, on July 26, 1943, McConnell joined the navy in 1966 after graduating from Furman College in Greenville with a bachelor’s degree in economics. Over the next twenty-five years, he held a succession of increasingly important positions in naval intelligence, including deputy director of the DIA for joint staff support from 1990 until being nominated for the top job at NSA in 1992.31 McConnell was chosen not because of his intelligence background, but rather for his superior communications skills, which he demonstrated while serving as the Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence briefer during Operation Desert Storm. The chairman of the JCS, General Colin Powell, lobbied vigorously for McConnell’s appointment.32

  In a New Yorker article, Lawrence Wright describes McConnell as a man with “pale, thin, sandy hair, blue eyes, and skin as pink as a baby’s. His back troubles him, and he walks with a slight stoop, which becomes more pronounced as the day wears on. His friends describe him as quick-minded and crafty, with an unusual ability to synthesize large amounts of information. A workaholic, he regularly lugged two briefcases home each night.”33

  McConnell was determined to give the U.S. military more and better intelligence and maintain NSA’s access to the global communications infrastructure, as well as making the agency “leaner and more effective,” despite shrinking bud gets and declining manpower.34In September 1992, McConnell, aware that the Bush White House intended to impose more bud get cuts on NSA, ordered a preemptive overhaul and reorganization of the entire agency coupled with deep personnel cuts. He knew that the “reduction in force” was going to hurt his agency badly, but he was convinced that reducing the size of NSA’s huge and very expensive bureaucracy was the only way to find the money to develop and buy the new and very expensive SIGINT collection technology NSA desperately needed. McConnell dryly noted some years later, “The message that I took to the NSA bureaucracy was not warmly embraced.”35

  Between 1990 and 1995, the U.S. intelligence community’s bud get had been cut by 16 percent, and 20 percent of the community’s workforce (20,559 men and women) had been forced into early retirement or laid off. NSA’s bud -get was slashed by one third, which forced the agency to cut the size of its workforce by an equal amount and impose a freeze on hiring and pay raises.

  A declassified congressional study concluded, “One of the side effects of NSA’s downsizing, outsourcing and transformation has been the loss of critical program management expertise, systems engineering, and requirements definition skills.” Research and development on new collection and process-ing systems and technologies came to a near-completestandstill as NSA’s money was diverted to keeping ongoing operations alive and producing intelligence. 36

  One Damn Crisis After Another

  In November 1992, President Bush ordered American troops into Somalia to restore order and feed millions of starving Somalis in the famine-stricken, war-torn country. The intelligence that was available was so bad that General Anthony Zinni, the U.S. military’s chief of operations there, was quoted as saying, “I don’t know Somalis from salami.”37

  NSA played virtually no role in the U.S. military intervention because there was no Somali government and thus no diplomatic or military communications for it to monitor. The first army combat unit sent in, the Tenth Mountain Division, brought no SIGINT intercept gear with it. Because of this oversight, it was unable to “exploit the lucrative long-range radio communications between the warring factions” after discovering that the militia forces commanded by General Mohammed Farrah Aideed indeed used radios and walkie-talkies. The U.S. Marine Corps, however, sent a small SIGINT detachment to support the first marine combat units to land. So effective was the detachment’s gathering of critically important intelligence that it was awarded the NSA’s 1993 Director’s Trophy. 38

  SIGINT played a relatively small but nonetheless important role during the U.S. invasion of Haiti, in September 1994. Prior to and during the invasion, NSA listening posts provided strategic SIGINT support for American forces by monitoring the shortwave communications traffic of the Haitian armed forces and intercepting the telephone calls of the Haitian strongman Lieutenant General Raoul Cédras as he negotiated his resignation and safe passage from the country with foreign intermediaries. NSA also monitored the communications of the Haitian exile leader and future president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, as he waited in a hotel suite in Washington and provided insights into his intentions that were useful to the White House and State Department. 39

  Once U.S. Army ground troops had taken control of the country, army SIGINT intercept personnel (including a small number of newly recruited Creole linguists) were flown in from the United States to monitor the citizens’ band radio communications and walkie-talkie traffic of what was left of the former regime’s army and police forces, using portable radio scanners purchased from Radio Shack and other commercial vendors.40

  But by far, the crisis that taxed NSA the most was the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, especially the civil war in Bosnia. NSA had begun paying serious attention to Yugo slavia in 1990–1991 as the country disintegrated into six in dependent states, which became engulfed in an orgy of bloodshed and ethnic cleansing.

  The best intelligence came from SIGINT, especially from the joint CIA-NSA listening post inside the U.S. embassy in Belgrade. Unfortunately, according to the late Warren Zimmermann, the U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1989 to 1992, in 1991 he was not provided with these “real time intercepts involving Serbian politicians, Yugoslav army, people we had a tremendous amount of interest in. It was information that would have been extremely useful to us in our dealings then.”41

  SIGINT coverage of the bitter civil war in Bosnia between Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian Muslim militaries was intensified shortly after President Bill Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993. The newly reconstituted NSA Operations Analysis Group A, headed from 1992 to 1996 by William Black Jr., focused on identifying and tracking the command-and-control nets, the air defense networks, and the logistics structures supporting the Serbian-backed Bosnian Serbs, the Croatians, and the Bosnian Muslims as they struggled for control of Bosnia.42

  NSA’s SIGINT satellites were able to intercept much of the communications traffic coming in and out of the Bosnian Serb general staff headquarters, which was translated and processed in real time by NSA and military SIGINT personnel at NSA’s Bad Aibling Station listening post, in southern Germany, then passed to consumers within the U.S. intelligence community. The information contained in these intercepts yielded vital intelligence about Serb military activities in Bosnia, as well as insights into the somewhat twisted personality of the Bosnian Serb military commander, General Ratko Mladic.43NSA’s coverage of the telecommunications traffic of the Muslim Bosnian government in Sarajevo was also excellent. In 1996, SIGINT intercepts of Bosnian government communications traffic revealed that hundreds of Irani an Revolutionary Guard military personnel were still operating throughout the territory c
ontrolled by the Bosnian government, despite the government’s promise to throw them out of the country under the terms of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords.44

  SIGINT played a key role in ensuring the effectiveness of the U.S. and NATO air strikes on Bosnian Serb military units and their air defensenetwork in August and September 1995. Before the strikes, NSA’s SIGINT assets allowed U.S. intelligence analysts to thoroughly map the Yugoslav and Bosnian Serb air defense systems in Bosnia. SIGINT also showed that Yugoslavian early-warning radars positioned inside Bosnian Serb territory were monitoring NATO air activity over Bosnia, and that the data from these radars was being fed in near real time to Bosnian Serb army commanders in northeastern Bosnia.45

  After the Dayton Peace Accords were signed on November 21, 1995, American ground troops belonging to the First Armored Division were sent into Bosnia in early 1996 as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. They were accompanied by a host of American SIGINT collection assets, whose mission it was to warn the American forces of any threat from the former warring parties. Unfortunately, there was little to monitor since most of the communications and air defense infrastructure had been destroyed or, according to a U.S. Army SIGINT officer, “intimidated into silence during NATO-sanctioned air strikes conducted in May and August 1995 . . . The loss of access to many of these intelligence sources created a difficult problem for continued monitoring of compliance by the former belligerent parties in the Dayton Peace Accords.” By mid-1996, SIGINT in Bosnia had come to an almost completestandstill, since Serbian radio traffic decreased markedly after military operations ended.46

  Still, senior Clinton administration officials marveled at the agency’s ability to garner one “hot” intelligence scoop after another. For example, SIGINT was instrumental in cracking the communications network of the Medellín cartel, revealing the hiding place of its leader, Pablo Escobar, who was killed in December 1993 by the Colombian National Police. In the mid-1990s, NSA produced some incredibly important intelligence about what was transpiring inside the government of Saudi Arabia, including cell phone conversations of senior members of the Saudi royal family talking about high-level government policy.47 Then on February 24, 1996, NSA intercepted the radio chatter of Cuban fighter pilots as they shot down two unarmed Cessna aircraft, flown by Cuban American pilots belonging to the Miami-based organization Brothers to the Rescue, off the coast of Cuba. The incident led President Clinton to sign the so-called Helms-Burton Act, which made permanent the economic embargo against Cuba, which had been in place unofficially since 1962.48

  Bad and Worse Choices

  Based on NSA’s less than stellar performance in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia, senior military intelligence officials were demanding immediate improvements in the intelligence support they got from NSA. In all three crises, it turned out that NSA had very little information in its files about the enemy forces facing the U.S. military. During the actual operations, as noted earlier, it was quickly discovered that much of the high-tech SIGINT equipment that NSA and the military brought with them to these less developed countries was poorly suited for the “low-tech” surroundings they were operating in.

  And in those cases where there were some communications to intercept, once the enemy fighters in Somalia and Bosnia discovered that NSA and the U.S. military were monitoring their communications, they turned off their radios and reverted to human couriers and intercept-proof telephone landlines.49Particularly galling for NSA officials was the fact that in all three operations, HUMINT collected by the CIA and U.S. military intelligence was the primary intelligence source for the U.S. military forces— not SIGINT.50

  Many senior Pentagon officials, rightly or wrongly, believed that NSA was not giving commanders in the field the intelligence they needed. One reason for this problem was that the older and more experienced NSA analysts who knew more about the needs of these customers had been let go or had resigned as part of the agency’s “reduction in force” in the early 1990s.51

  The long series of crises described above stretched collection resources to the breaking point and diverted personnel and capital away from much-needed modernization programs and infrastructure improvement projects.52

  As a result, the crucial reform plans that Mike McConnell brought with him when he came to the agency in May 1992 never got implemented. In fact, all indications are that NSA’s bureaucratic infarction got worse during McConnell’s tenure, leading the agency to make costly mistakes in resource allocation and spending priorities. For example, a 1996 Defense Department inspector general report revealed that in 1991 and 1992 alone, NSA lost eighty-two million dollars’ worth of equipment, which it chose to write off on its financial statements rather than find out the fate of.53

  But what was really killing NSA was the size of the agency’s payroll. Although the number of NSA personnel plummeted during McConnell’s tenure, the cost of paying those who remained skyrocketed as the agency had to reach deep into its pockets to try to keep its best and brightest from jumping ship and joining the dot-com boom. NSA stripped ever-increasing amounts of money from infrastructure improvement programs and its research and development efforts so that it could meet its payroll. It was left with little money to develop and build the new equipment desperately needed to access international communications traffic being carried by new and increasingly important telecommunications technologies, such as the Internet, cellular telephones, and fiber-optic cables. It was a decision that would, according to a former senior NSA official, “come back and bite us in the ass.”54

  The Minihan Years at NSA: 1996–1999

  In February 1996, NSA director McConnell retired. During his tenure, in the opinion of senior agency officials, he simply failed to address the stultifying bureaucracy in NSA’s upper ranks and to fully grasp the scope of agency operations, though he was an effective spokesman for NSA in front of administration officials and Congress.55

  His replacement was the fifty-two-year-old director of DIA, Lieutenant General Kenneth Minihan of the U.S. Air Force. A career intelligence officer but with little operational experience with SIGINT, Minihan was born in Pampa, Texas, on December 31, 1943. After graduating from Florida State University in June 1966, he was commissioned into the air force. As he moved up in rank, he served in a wide variety of intelligence positions, including air force assistant chief of staff, intelligence, from 1994 to 1995; he was the director of DIA from 1995 until being named NSA director in February 1996.56

  By his own admission, Minihan was chosen because the Pentagon believed he would not only emphasize SIGINT support for the military, but also improve the Pentagon’s shaky customer-client relationship with the agency.57

  Many former senior NSA officials interviewed for this book regard Minihan’s tenure at Fort Meade, from 1996 to 1999, as a period fraught with controversy, during which NSA continued to refocus its efforts away from traditional targets and toward new transnational targets, such as narcotics trafficking and international terrorism, and not always with great success. Money, or lack thereof, was a recurring theme during Minihan’s term in office. NSA, like every other agency in the U.S. intelligence community, was trying to get more money out of the Clinton White House or Congress, but without much success. CIA director George Tenet admitted, “The fact is that by the mid-to late 1990s American intelligence was in Chapter 11, and neither Congress nor the executive branch did much about it.”58This led to pitched battles within the intelligence community over which agency would get how much of the money grudgingly allocated by Congress. In November 1998, Minihan, who by this time was a lame duck, made a final plea to the White House and the Pentagon to approve more money for NSA, pointing out that since the end of the Cold War, the agency had lost one third of its manpower and budget and much of its ability to access target communications, and that its antiquated infrastructure was crumbling and desperately in need of repair. He failed, in part because of the widely held view that NSA was being badly mismanaged.59

  The congressional
intelligence oversight committees could not get Minihan or his deputy, Barbara McNamara, to make fundamental reforms or even to send to Congress something as simple as a business plan for the agency. Inaction on the part of the agency’s leadership forced Congress to act. In the House Intelligence Committee’s May 1998 annual report, the chairman, Porter Goss, announced that his committee had “fenced in,” or restricted, the agency’s access to a large part of its annual budget because of NSA’s continuing intransigence and resistance to reform.60

  Today, in the opinion of some NSA veterans, Minihan’s tenure at the helm of NSA is viewed as having been largely ineffectual. When he produced an agency mission statement in June 1996 titled “National Cryptologic Strategy for the 21st Century,” agency staff members were mortified to find it full of vague generalities rather than specifics about how NSA was to meet the increasing challenges it faced.61

  Efforts by Minihan and his staff to patch up the agency’s rocky relationship with the Pentagon largely failed. In March 1997, a full year after he took office, Minihan briefed the senior military leadership on how NSA would improve its SIGINT support for the military. One senior military intelligence official who attended it recalls that Minihan used every current Pentagon buzzword (asymmetric, paradigm, templates, etc.) but offered nothing tangible about how things would be improved—other than suggesting that NSA and the military work more closely together.62

  Yet as the NSA muddled along and one scandal after another rocked the CIA during the mid-1990s, and as the agency’s clandestine intelligence capabilities slowly eroded, the Clinton administration came to increasingly treat NSA and its sister intelligence organization, the National Reconnaissance Office, with greater deference, in large part because the SIGINT coming out of NSA was viewed as “cleaner” and less controversial than the material produced by the CIA.63