The Secret Sentry

by Matthew M. Aid

  NSA’s constellation of SIGINT satellites in orbit over the earth is in trouble, largely because of foul-ups by program managers at the NRO during the mid-1990s. Faulty satellite designs, constantly changing collection requirements, launch delays, and a few spectacular spacecraft failures have hobbled attempts to put into space a new generation of SIGINT satellites capable of monitoring the kinds of unconventional targets that NSA must now confront. The result has been that over the past decade the agency’s SIGINT satellites have not proved to be particularly effective in monitoring insurgent communications traffic in either Iraq or Afghanistan, nor have they been of much use in trying to track down al Qaeda terrorists. Moreover, the enormous amount of time and money needed to redesign and launch the new generation of SIGINT satellites needed to monitor the growing number of cell phone and other personal communications devices is prohibitive.61

  And despite massive investments in new and costly SIGINT collection technologies since 9/11, NSA is still experiencing a difficult time gaining access to the communications of many of its principal global targets, such as Iran and North Korea, who are increasingly using buried fiber-optic cables to handle important internal communications traffic in lieu of radio. The agency is also finding it increasingly difficult to locate the communications of al Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations, who in recent years have made NSA’s job maddeningly difficult by almost completely ceasing to use telephones and radios.62A 2005 report to President Bush urged NSA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community to take more risks, stating, “Regaining signals intelligence access must be a top priority. The collection agencies are working hard to restore some of the access that they have lost; and they’ve had some successes. And again, many of these recent steps in the right direction are the result of innovative examples of cross-agency cooperation . . . Success on this front will require greater willingness to accept financial costs, political risks, and even human casualties.”63

  This has meant that NSA has had to work, albeit very reluctantly, more closely with its age-old archnemesis, the CIA, in an effort to regain access to these “hard” targets. What outside observers of SIGINT often fail to realize is that in the last fifty years SIGINT has become increasingly dependent on HUMINT for much of its success, leading to what can best be described as a symbiotic relationship between these two intelligence disciplines. Former CIA director John Deutch wrote in the magazine Foreign Policy, “Cooperation between human and technical intelligence, especially communications intelligence, makes both stronger. Human sources . . . can provide access to valuable signals intelligence . . . Communications intercepts can validate information provided by a human source.”64

  A few of these extremely risky operations have broken to the surface. In January 1999, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post revealed that NSA and the CIA had helped to create a covert SIGINT system to aid U.N. weapons inspectors in locating and destroying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This clandestine SIGINT collection program began in February 1996 and consisted of commercially available very high frequency (VHF) intercept receivers provided by the CIA being secretly placed inside the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) headquarters at Al-Thawra, in the suburbs of Baghdad. In addition, sophisticated radio scanners hidden inside backpacks were used by the U.N. inspection teams when they operated in the field. This system remained in place until the U.N. weapons inspectors were forced out of Iraq in December 1998.65 In October 2001, Chinese security officials discovered twenty-seven high-tech listening devices planted throughout a brand-new Boeing 767 that was to serve as the Chinese president’s personal aircraft. The security officials even found bugs in the airplane’s bathroom and in the headboard of the president’s bed. Although the bugging operation was a diplomatic embarrassment, it showed the lengths that the CIA and NSA were willing to go to in order to listen to what the Chinese leader was saying.66

  But as each of the previous chapters has made clear, historically NSA’s Achilles’ heel has not been its ability to collect material from around the world. Rather, what has hurt the agency the most has been its inability to process, analyze, and report on the material that it collects. The agency continues to collect far more than it can possibly analyze, and it analyzes more than it actually reports to its customers. In January 2007, NSA director Alexander admitted to Congress that the agency was still experiencing great difficulty coping with the ever-increasing backlog of unprocessed intercepts that were piling up at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, many of which were intercepts of foreign terrorist message traffic.67

  Some agency insiders now believe that NSA is only able to report on about 1 percent of the data that it collects, and it is getting harder every day to find within this 1 percent meaningful intelligence. Senior Defense and State Department officials refer to this problem as the “gold to garbage ratio,” which holds that it is becoming increasingly difficult and more expensive for NSA to find nuggets of useful intelligence in the ever-growing pile of garbage that it has to plow through. This has raised some questions in the minds of U.S. government officials as to whether all the money being spent on NSA’s SIGINT program is a worthwhile investment. Former State Department official Herbert Levin noted, “NSA can point to things they have obtained that have been useful, but whether they’re worth the billions that are spent, is a genuine question in my mind.”68

  The Thin Red Line

  Today, NSA and the U.S. military’s SIGINT units find themselves spread perilously thin. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with the never-ending “global war on terror,” continue to eat up the vast majority of NSA’s SIGINT collection and processing resources, forcing the agency to give short shrift to many important intelligence targets, such as the former Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Bosnia, and the national narcotics interdiction program. The draining away of resources from North Korea, for example, has been a cause of great concern since 9/11 because the United States admittedly has almost no spies operating there, and from a SIGINT perspective North Korea is an extremely tough target to monitor.69The same thing has happened in En gland since 9/11. The British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee in its June 2003 annual report warned that the shift of precious intelligence collection resources from other targets to counterterrorism was creating a dangerous situation, stating, “These reductions are causing intelligence gaps to develop, which may mean over time unacceptable risks will arise in terms of safeguarding national security and in the prevention and detecting of Serious Organised Crime.”70

  NSA has been forced to continue to strip personnel from a number of offices within its SIGINT Directorate at Fort Meade in order to keep its coun-terterrorism operations going, as well as maintain U.S. and overseas listening posts at full strength. The result has been that the number of complaints from NSA’s customers, especially CIA and State Department officials, has risen dramatically in the past several years as more “legacy” targets not connected to the war on terrorism or the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered for lack of attention and resources.71Sources note that NSA’s inability to dedicate sufficient resources to monitoring narcotics trafficking in the western hemisphere has forced the small SIGINT organization within the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to largely take over this responsibility.72 The increasingly important role of the DEA, the CIA, and the military services in the SIGINT field has led, in turn, to the diminishment of NSA’s control over the national SIGINT effort. The result has been that NSA has lost somewhat the all-important “centrality of command” that it once enjoyed.73

  Because of the stress and strain caused by trying to fight three wars simultaneously, there are now persistent and pervasive personnel shortages at NSA and in the U.S. military SIGINT organizations in virtually every critical specialty. In particular, the agency and the U.S. military have experienced significant problems recruiting and retaining linguists who are fluent enough in the exotic languages spoken in Iraq and Afghanistan. Attempts by NSA in 2001
– 2002 to hire first-generation immigrants living in the United States who speak Pashto, Urdu, and Dari, the main languages spoken in Afghanistan, immediately ran into roadblocks imposed by the omnipresent security officials, who forbade their use. An American intelligence officer was quoted as saying, “NSA cannot get anyone through the background check and vetting process . . . They have created an unachievably highstandard for hiring.”74

  The U.S. military’s SIGINT units are in even worse shape. The result of declining reenlistment rates and deteriorating morale has been pervasive personnel shortages throughout the military SIGINT components along with a commensurate decline in unit readiness levels.

  Interviews with current and former U.S. military intelligence officials confirm that the U.S. military’s SIGINT system, like the U.S. military as a whole, is deep in crisis. Resources everywhere are stretched to the limit. Interviews confirm that the number-one problem facing the military SIGINT system is personnel, or lack thereof. Over the past six years, frequent and lengthy deployments in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, coupled with the military’s extremely unpopular “stop-loss” policy of arbitrarily extending terms of service, including those of many SIGINT specialists, such as Arabic linguists, have for all intents and purposes exhausted the military’s corps of SIGINT personnel. As a result, attrition rates among military SIGINT personnel are high and getting worse, with some SIGINT units reporting that more than 50 percent of their first-term recruits are not reenlisting because of the severe hardships associated with repeated tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, hundreds of veteran noncommissioned officers and enlisted SIGINT intercept technicians and linguists have chosen to leave the service because of the strain that frequent deployments are having on their families and their own mental health. Interviews with over a dozen currently serving military SIGINT operators reveal that there is one common thread running through their complaints about current conditions—an all-consuming desire for a sense of normalcy in their lives.75

  There have also been pervasive equipment shortages to contend with, brought on by the intensive demands of fighting three wars simultaneously. These shortages have meant that SIGINT collection equipment has to be kept in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving very little for troops to train on upon their return to the United States from their overseas tours of duty. As a result, training and readiness levels of military SIGINT units based in the United States have declined steadily over the past six years. Army and Marine Corps intelligence commanders have confirmed that the equipment in the military’s SIGINT units is worn out from nonstop usage in the harsh and unforgiving field environments of Iraq and Afghanistan and is in urgent need of refurbishment or replacement. Moreover, replacement equipment purchases have not kept pace with field losses. Shortages of highly skilled maintenance personnel and spare parts have led to frequent equipment outages at inopportune moments in Afghanistan and Iraq.76For example, widespread computer problems meant that the army SIGINT platoon assigned to Forward Operating Base Loyalty in east Baghdad spent the entire month of February 2006 “performing duties not related to their specialty.”77

  These anecdotal conclusions were confirmed by a 2006 report by Major General Barbara Fast, the former commandant of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, in Arizona, which found that army intelligence specialists were spending more than one year out of every two deployed overseas, and that as a result, reenlistment rates among these specialists, including SIGINT collectors, were falling fast. Many units returning from Iraq were reporting that in addition to being exhausted and short of personnel, they had had to leave behind their equipment, which meant that they had nothing to train with once they got back to the United States. Fast’s conclusion was that the intense operations tempo associated with trying to fight three wars simultaneously was “consuming the MI [military intelligence] force.”78

  Searching for a Cure

  Today, NSA’s modernization programs are, to varying degrees, well over bud -get and years behind schedule. Recent revelations in the press show that yet another of the agency’s hugely expensive modernization programs, Turbulence, has also experienced significant delays and cost overruns, raising doubts within the U.S. intelligence community as to whether it will ever work the way it was originally envisioned. The serious problems being experienced by NSA in bringing this program to fruition prompted intense criticism from members of the Senate intelligence committee during a rare public hearing in March 2007, where they forcefully made clear their concern about where NSA’s transformation efforts were headed, writing, “NSA’s transformation program, Trailblazer, has been terminated because of severe management problems, and its successor, Turbulence, is experiencing the same management deficiencies that have plagued the NSA since at least the end of the Cold War.”79

  But these problems may, in fact, be the tip of the iceberg. As strange as it may sound, one of the most urgent problems facing NSA is a severe shortage of electrical power, which threatens to derail the agency’s efforts at Fort Meade unless fixed. It will come as no surprise that NSA is a massive consumer of electricity, which, as every American consumer knows, is an increasingly expensive commodity. As of 2000, NSA’s annual electricity bill from Baltimore Gas and Electric amounted to twenty-one million dollars. But higher gasoline prices and the continued deterioration of the national electricity grid resulted in NSA’s annual bill rising to almost thirty million dollars by 2007.80 However, the rising cost of electricity is not what is currently strangling NSA. Rather, during the 1990s and post 9/11 era, the agency neglected to build new power generators needed to run the ever-growing number of computers and other high-tech systems that the agency has been buying en masse since 9/11. The situation has become so grave that in many NSA offices at Fort Meade the installation of new computers and data processing systems has been put on hold because there is not enough electricity to run them, and NSA’s power grid has become so overtaxed that there have been occasional brownouts of key operational offices for as much as half a day. However, press reports indicate some resistance within the Office of Management and Budget to giving NSA additional funds because the agency has once again failed to provide a detailed accounting of why the money is needed or how it will be spent.81

  As a result, much of the groundswell of support that NSA once enjoyed inside Congress and the U.S. intelligence community after 9/11 has slowly slipped away as it has become clear that the agency’s modernization and reform efforts are not being effectively managed. A former NSA official quoted in a press report said, “Right after Sept. 11 and the ensuing period, I think NSA could have gotten anything they wanted. They lost the support because they didn’t handle it properly.”82

  So one of the top items on General Alexander’s to-do list today is to try to right the ship and put NSA’s internal reforms and modernization efforts back on track, while at the same time increasing the agency’s productivity and maintaining its reputation within the U.S. intelligence community. Fixing all of these problems at once will not be easy or cheap. In January 2007, NSA asked Congress for an additional one billion dollars in supplemental funding, and another one billion for 2008. All this was on top of NSA’s huge eight-billion-dollar annual budget already approved by Congress.83

  And yet, despite all the money, resources, and high-level attention being lavished on NSA, there are signs that the agency’s “golden days” may be almost over. Agency insiders interviewed for this book understand that following the Bush administration, a greater degree of fiscal austerity and stricter oversight controls will almost certainly return. A now-retired senior NSA official said it best: “I guess we are going to have to go back to the ‘bad old days’ of doing more with less. It was a great ride while it lasted.”84

  Acknowledgments

  For the past year the National Security Archive in downtown Washington, D.C., has been my home away from home. Without the generous and unstinting support of the archive’s director, Tom Blanton, and his staff of dedicated professional
s I would not have been able to complete this work. Special thanks go to the archive’s general counsel, Meredith Fuchs, and longtime friend Dr. William Burr, both of whom kept me on track and helped me avoid pitfalls in the road.

  Three longtime friends and colleagues deserve special thanks for the incredible support they provided me. For the past twenty-five years, Dr. Jeffrey T. Richelson has been a veritable fount of knowledge and wisdom about the U.S. intelligence community, generously providing me with thousands of pages of documents from his collection and pointing me to where more could be found. He is a walking encyclopedia about the U.S. intelligence community. My friend and coauthor Dr. Cees Wiebes did more to push me along than just about anyone else, even if I did not want to go. Every author needs someone like him to keep them honest and their eyes on the prize. And last but not least, I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend and colleague of many years Rosemary Lark, without whom this project would never have been completed.

  Over the past twenty-five years, hundreds of individuals freely provided me with documents, leads, and advice. I wish to particularly acknowledge to assistance of the following individuals: Dr. Richard J. Aldrich, Dr. David Alvarez, Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., Dr. Dwayne A. Day, Ralph Erskine, Angela Gendron, Nicky Hager, Seymour M. Hersh, Dr. Robert S. Hopkins, Alf R. Jacobsen, Dr. David Kahn, Miriam A. Kleiman, Dr. Edwin E. Moïse, Dr. Olav Riste, Bill Robinson, Dr. Martin Rudner, Susan Strange, Dr. Athan Theoharis, and Dr. Wesley Wark. Any omissions are purely the fault of the author.

  During the past twenty-five years, it has been my pleasure to sit down for lengthy and candid conversations with dozens of former and current officials of the NSA and other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community, many of whom have sadly passed away since I began my research. These men and women helped me sketch out the history of an agency that remains to this day largely invisible, even to those who hold a Top Secret Codeword security clearance. Almost all did so with the understanding that I would not name them, and I have respected their wishes, despite the fact that a number of these individuals have since passed away. Without their help I never would have been able to even begin to understand what NSA does or how important it is.