PART 4: THE SHADOW FACTORY THE ULTRA SECRET NSA FROM 9/11 TO THE EAVESDROPPING ON AMERICA

THE SHADOW FACTORY
The Ultra Secret NSA from 9/11 to the To The Eavesdropping on America 
BY JAMES BAMFORD 

Highlander 

The phone next to John Berry’s bed rang shortly after 6:00 a.m. It was September 11, 2001, and his girlfriend, Sharilyn Bailey, had some urgent news. “She told me to turn on the television and asked if my army reserve unit had already called,” he said. “I found the remote and clicked on the set.” Berry was a thirty-seven-year-old reporter for the Press-Enterprise, a newspaper in the central California city of Riverside, where his beat was Moreno Valley. Once a dry cattle-ranching and citrus-farming town built around March Air Force Base, Moreno Valley by 2001 had become a sprawling, rapidly growing desert valley in the Inland Empire. 

The day before, Berry had been covering the debate over whether to increase the town’s landscaping fees. He never made it back to the city council meeting. “As soon as I saw it on TV, I knew that my life was about to change,” he said. In addition to his work as a reporter, Berry was also a reserve army warrant officer and an NSA Arabic linguist with nearly twenty years of both active and reserve duty. “I knew the army would be calling soon.” 

In the days and weeks following the attacks of 9/11, as the agency’s budget ballooned, General Hayden began an enormous building campaign. His key focus was the agency’s four highly secret U.S.-based eavesdropping locations in Georgia, Texas, Colorado, and Hawaii. After the Cold War, the NSA closed down many of its listening posts around the world and replaced them with much smaller, remotely operated facilities. The intercept operators and analysts—mostly in the military—were then moved back to the U.S. and consolidated in four giant operational centers across the country, like eavesdropping factories. Three targeted separate parts of the globe while a fourth downloaded data from satellites and transmitted it to the others. To increase speed, the results would then be forwarded directly to the users—military commanders on the front lines and elsewhere around the world. A copy would also go to the NSA at Fort Meade, as would traffic too hard to break or too difficult to analyze. What Hayden needed most were Arabic linguists, and the military quickly began activating every one they could find. One of those was John Berry. 

Like many NSA linguists, Berry had learned Arabic during an eighteen month tour at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey in California. He was part of a small group of Arabic and Farsi (spoken in Iran) linguists assigned to the 345th Military Intelligence Battalion based in Georgia. Six times a year he would be flown there from California for weekend reserve training. He was thus little surprised when on September 28 he picked up his phone at work and heard the smoke-laden voice of the training sergeant. “Mr. Berry,” he said. “You’ve been tapped.” A little more than a week later, Berry had filled two seventy-pound duffel bags, stored his red 1996 Saturn in Sharilyn’s garage (she also agreed to take his two cats), and made arrangements for the army to hire a moving company to clear out his apartment. 

Berry’s next stop was Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he would be processed into active duty. He arrived on October 9, and when he wasn’t in long lines getting shots, having eye exams, or trying on gas masks, he was running around looking for a phone jack for his computer in order to check his e-mail. “They took a sliver of us—the Arabic linguists and the Farsi linguists,” he said. 

Elsewhere on the same base was another Arabic linguist who had been activated. As Berry was hunting for outlets, twenty-four-year-old Sergeant Adrienne J. Kinne was sitting in a steel high chair being poked with a needle. A native of Utica, New York, she had spent four years on active duty, from 1994 until 1998. Before her recall she was studying for her master’s degree at Augusta State University. The previous May she had graduated from the University of Virginia. Both Berry and Kinne were among the reservists called up from the 345th Military Intelligence Battalion because of their language training in Arabic and Farsi. “There were six of us from the 345th,” said Berry. “I had known her [Kinne] since 1998. I was her language officer.” 

Kinne described the command structure at Fort Bragg as constantly in a state of confusion. “It’s like one day we’re going to go off to Uzbekistan, another day it’s we’re going to get stationed at NSA, another day we’re going to be in Virginia somewhere. And then, lo and behold, they finally got us our year-long orders and we were assigned back at Fort Gordon.” 

Formerly known as the Georgia Regional Security Operations Center and renamed N.S.A/C.S.S Georgia, the facility seemed ill-suited for its purpose. It consisted of five buildings, including barracks and mess hall, spread out over several miles, with the majority of operations carried out in Back Hall, located on the corner of busy Chamberlain Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. Inside the old 90,920-square-foot classroom building, intercept operators, analysts, and their equipment were crammed into small classrooms on opposite sides of wide hallways. It is there that analysts may have monitored the communications flowing between the Yemen ops center and Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego. 

During her first tour at the listening post in the mid to late nineties, Kinne eavesdropped on Arabic military communications intercepted by the N.S.A’s signals intelligence satellites. “It would be collected by satellite over there and beamed back to us,” she said. “It was all digital, so you would be sitting at your computer and you would call up your receiver . . . We had pre-programmed lists where it would target certain frequencies and you could scan through that. So a lot of time you would have four receivers going, two in each ear, and I would be just scanning . . . I remember a couple of times when I was just recording three different conversations at once.” 

One of Kinne’s principal targets was the Syrian military. “I could transcribe it live, especially Syrian military,” she said. “Pretty much you would record anything that you heard because usually they would only be on if they were talking about something militaristic or something.” Kinne said the targets included a broad swath of countries from North Africa to most of the Middle East, including Israel. “We did have Hebrew linguists,” she said. “They had different subgroups, so one was Syria, one was Levantine area—Lebanon and Jordan. The PLO, I think, was in there. And then there was Northern Africa Section—Egypt, Sudan, Algeria . . . We worked the Levantine mission, and then another group right next to us worked the North Africa mission . . . And eventually in that same room they stood up the Iraqi mission.” 

At the time, in the late 1990's, the listening post had about 1,200 people assigned to it. But following the attacks on 9/11, that number quickly doubled to 2,400 people. In the scramble for linguists, calls went out to contractors such as Titan, which supplied several dozen, and ads were placed in newspapers. 

As Berry and Kinne arrived at NSA Georgia in late November 2001, technicians were overflowing into the hallways and crammed into temporary trailers. The two were among the 350 intelligence reservists called up and assigned to the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade following the attacks. Because of their signals-intelligence and linguistic backgrounds, the two were placed in the 201st Military Intelligence Battalion, which specialized in Sigint. Berry became officer in charge of a top-secret program code-named Highlander that eavesdropped on Inmarsat satellite communications within the Middle East. Kinne worked for the program as a linguist. “We were the pioneers. We got there before the system did. And one day we saw these boxes in this room,” said Berry. “We needed to get thrown into the fight as soon as possible, and we got a system with no instruction manual, and so we literally figured it out one keystroke at a time . . . There was no guidance.” 

While much of the NSA was hunting for bin Laden by targeting the newer forms of communications, such as cell phones and the Internet, Berry noted, Inmarsat satellite phones still provided a wealth of intelligence. “Just because bin Laden drops that system, it doesn’t mean other people will,” he said. “Maybe if you go after his secretary, somebody who won’t be using the latest technology, then it could be lucrative. It’s like your boss may be having the best, most secure phone ever, but the office janitor won’t be. They’ll be using something you can intercept . . . Everybody goes after the golden ring, thinking, for example, bin Laden may be on the latest, most expensive thing, and it turns out you go a few levels below that, you find out a lot more . . . And that was absolutely amazing what we pulled out. I look back on it and it was like, ‘How did you guys [NSA] miss this?’ All along this was there.” 

To do this, the agency established a remote satellite interception capability at Camp Doha in Kuwait as the “front end” of the program. The base was located within the spot beam of Inmarsat I-3 F1, launched in 1996 to cover the Middle East and Indian Ocean region, and the signals were intercepted by a mobile antenna array known as Trojan Remote Receiver-38 (T.R.R-38). The manager and her five coworkers on the site were largely responsible for intercepting both sides of the conversations, putting them together, and then relaying them in near real time—a few minutes’ delay—to N.S.A Georgia. “The two halves of the conversation were recorded separately, but you could listen to them together,” Kinne noted. “They had one satellite phone and another satellite phone, and they would match it up together. It’s fairly close to live.” According to Berry, “It was like a big vacuum cleaner in the sky . . . We could listen to everything.” Berry also said that safety was a very big advantage. “As a platoon leader, I didn’t have to worry about our guys stepping on a land mine or getting shot. Because of technology it could all be done remotely—our biggest concern was weak coffee and bad drivers.” 

The intercepted conversations, or “cuts” as they were called, were transmitted to computers in the Highlander unit, where they would be stored in a “queue” until Kinne and her fellow voice interceptors could listen to them. “It would sort of collect everything from different satellites in the area and beam it back to us,” she said. “All this stuff was prerecorded. You could basically set up the front end to collect any conversation, automatically record it, and send it back. It’s five minutes old. It’s very near real time. It prerecorded everything, and at first everything was unidentified; we would just get these thousands of cuts dumped on us and they would just come up in our queue, and it was just like searching blindly through all these cuts to see what the hell was what . . . and we would slowly figure out some of the targets, like who went with what phone number.” 

After matching up the phone numbers with the callers, the unit began constructing a “phone book” of targets. “We got a phone number; we had to figure out who was on that phone number and if it was worth it,” said Berry. “So we constructed our own phone book.” Even unproductive phone numbers were sometimes kept. “Six months later, Ahmed can pass it [a cell phone] on to his brother, and it goes from being benign to malicious . . . You constantly get this flow, and it came to be we were really good—we got good at separating the wheat from the chaff. We got a lot of momentum going so that by the time Iraq started we were going full steam, and I think we really contributed to the war effort.” 

Because the system pulled in communications from the entire Middle East, the conversations were in a wide variety of languages and dialects. “It was Iraq, Afghanistan, and a whole swath of area. We would get Tajik, Uzbek, Russian, Chinese,” said Kinne. “It was just a big area—it was just like putting a vacuum in the sky and sucking it down,” added Berry. “And it was up to us to figure it out as to whether it was good or not.” Eliminating country codes from friendly countries, such as Kuwait, “would help a lot,” said Berry, “but these were mobile—a lot of them were mobile. We don’t know who it belongs to,here’s a strange frequency showing up, and until you listen to it you don’t know. There’s these thousands of signals out there.” When necessary, Berry could also call the NSA for help. “It’s like, hey, I’ve got a cut in whatever language—can you bring somebody to come and look at it. And they would.” 

As Kinne would switch to a new conversation, the phone numbers of the parties as well as their names would appear on her digital screen. “In our computer system, it would have the priority, the telephone number, the target’s name,” she said. This may have been as a result of a secret agreement in which Inmarsat turned over to the NSA all of its subscriber information. “And you could actually triangulate the location of the phone if you wanted to. We could ask our analysts to figure out the exact location of the phone,” said Kinne. Eventually, as the NSA gathered phone numbers from its warrant less eavesdropping program and from intelligence operations, those phone numbers would be sent down to NSA Georgia to be programmed into the computers. “At some point they started giving us, I don’t know who, telephone numbers to program into the system to specifically collect.” 

But because al-Qaeda communicated far less by satellite phone after 9/11, and with little supervision of the intercept operators, much of what they eavesdropped on were communications involving journalists, nongovernmental organizations (N.G.O's) such as the Red Cross, and business people. “There was no quality control; there were no senior linguists,” said Kinne. Berry also said there was little oversight from above, but saw that as an advantage. “It was because we weren’t being micromanaged is why I think we were so successful. Because we just did it on our own, we didn’t have to clear it with anybody.” Berry once asked a senior officer for guidance but received little more than a pat on the head. “I said, ‘Is there any guidance you want us to follow?’ And he said, ‘Chief Berry, your bubba's are doing fine, so just keep doing what you’re doing.’ And I said, ‘Yes sir, that’s what we’ll do.’ ” 

Berry also briefed the NSA director Mike Hayden about the Highlander program in March 2003, but Hayden expressed little interest. “He said, ‘Son, just tell me in five minutes.’ And I had this whole presentation and I said, ‘Sir, we did this, this, and this.’ He shook a few hands, gave a coin to someone, and walked out the door. They said you have fifteen minutes, but then they cut it to five right when he walked in the door.” The current NSA director, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, was also briefed on Highlander by Berry when Alexander was head of army intelligence. 

“As time went on we just saw the queue and it would just fill up with a lot of N.G.O's and humanitarian organizations and journalists,” said Kinne. While the journalists and others were originally picked up at random, once in the system they then became permanent targets. “It’s random at first, but once it’s identified and you know who it is, the system is programmed to intercept those cuts and send it into the system at whatever priority we designated it as . . . And there was priority one through eight. Priority one was terrorists, which we rarely had anything related to that. And N.G.O's were priority five to seven, and journalists—all those were priority five to seven. Eight was we didn’t have a linguist to translate it, and then nine was all the unidentified stuff.” 

Berry says his operation conscientiously avoided eavesdropping on Americans. “The thing is you can’t listen to Americans, and I was very careful that we never did because, one, it’s illegal. Two, I realized that we were in a kind of electronic minefield, so if I ever had a question about it then I would call the NSA’s lawyers and I would describe the situation to them and they said yes, you can do this, you can’t do that. They’ve got as many lawyers as they’ve got parking spaces.” The problem, he said, was not knowing who was on the other end of an intercept. “You’re sucking in someone you don’t know who it is until you listen to it.” 

But Kinne said that even though the intercept operators knew they were eavesdropping on American journalists communicating with other journalists and their families in the U.S., the decision was made to continue listening to, recording, and storing the conversations. “Basically all rules were thrown out the window and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans,” said Kinne. “Because you could program the system to pick up specific phone numbers, you could also program the system to block phone numbers. And so we could have blocked the humanitarian aid organizations and all those other ones, but they said that we had to monitor them just in case they ever talked about—because they were eyes on the ground—just in case they ever talked about seeing weapons of mass destruction anywhere and gave a location. Or in case they ever lost their phone and some random terrorist picked it up and started using it . . . And for those two reasons, we could listen to all the N.G.O's, humanitarian aid organizations, and frigging journalists in the area—continue to even after they were identified and we knew who they were and that they weren’t terrorists or terrorist-affiliated . . . So that was the excuse they gave.” 

Operation Highlander was an extraordinary and illegal expansion of the original purpose of the new program, which was to eavesdrop on Americans only when an NSA supervisor had a reasonable belief that the person on the other end was a member of al-Qaeda. “If you’re talking to a member of al-Qaeda,” said Bush, “we want to know why.” But these people were not members of al-Qaeda, and they weren’t talking to terrorists. Nevertheless, according to Kinne, the standard operating procedure was to keep recording them and not delete the numbers. “They were just hesitant to ever block phone numbers or drop them from the system,” said Kinne. “There were no really clear-cut rules. They activated twenty reservists and stood up this elaborate high-tech mission and just said run with it.” 

Kinne had spent several years at NSA Georgia prior to the attacks on 9/11 and was shocked that they were now targeting Americans. The internal N.S.A regulations on handling communications involving U.S. persons were spelled out in a top-secret document known as United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (U.S.S.I.D 18). “When I was on active duty before, we took U.S.S.I.D 18 incredibly seriously, and I just remember collecting a Syrian military cut once where in the report they mentioned an American diplomat who was visiting the region by name. And because they mentioned the American’s name, we deleted the cut, we deleted everything. Maybe we didn’t technically have to, maybe we could have just left his name out of the report, but we deleted everything, and I think that just goes to show the level to which we took U.S.S.I.D 18 incredibly seriously.” 

Worried about violating not only N.S.A internal regulations but federal law, Kinne says she brought her concerns to Berry. “I said we’re not supposed to be listening to these people—not only are we not supposed to be listening to Americans, but there were five allied countries that we were not supposed to monitor either—the Five Eyes. But we listened to Australians, Canadians, Brits. And so it wasn’t just the Americans but that whole idea that you weren’t supposed to monitor those five countries either—citizens of those five countries . . . They told us that we could monitor calls from there to the States but that we could only report on the half of the conversation that took place in the Middle East. We couldn’t report on the half that took place in America. And when they waived it, we could monitor these people in the Five Eyes. In reports, we just couldn’t reference their citizenship country of origin. So you could report on the substance of the conversation, but not identify them as an individual.” 

Berry, however, again said his group never illegally eavesdropped on Americans. But when asked, “Did you ever pick up information from journalists, business people, or humanitarian organizations?” he simply said the answer was classified. “I can’t answer that,” he said. “I can’t talk about that.” He added, “I made sure my soldiers did the right thing.” 

The idea of permanently recording incredibly personal conversations between Americans—husbands, wives, and lovers—greatly bothered Kinne, and she made a personal decision to go out of her way to erase them. “A lot of times I would just delete them,” she said, “especially the halves that were taking place in America because they were picked up separately and recorded separately. I would just do that because I didn’t feel comfortable leaving it in the system and I didn’t . . . A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families, waking them up in the middle of the night because of the time difference. And so they would be talking all quiet and soft, and their family member is like half asleep—incredibly intimate, personal conversations—and I just can’t believe they were frigging recording them, and I don’t know why they would ever have to to begin with.” 

Another Arabic voice interceptor at NSA Georgia who became aware of the warrant less eavesdropping on Americans was David Murfee Faulk, who worked there until November 2007. Following the attacks on 9/11, Faulk, then thirty-two and a reporter at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, joined the navy to help in the fight against Osama bin Laden. With a master’s degree in German from the University of Chicago, he had a knack for languages and was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, for sixty-three weeks of Arabic training. Upon graduation he was assigned as a cryptologic technician to NSA Georgia, where he specialized in eavesdropping on Iraqi cell phone conversations in Baghdad. Among his friends at the listening post was an air force Arabic translator working for an operation known as Cobra Focus, which provided Sigint support to U.S. ground forces in Iraq. 

“One day he was ordered to transcribe every call that dropped in his queue,” said Faulk. “And the calls were all in English, they were all American, and the guy goes back to his supervisor, a warrant officer, and says, ‘Sir, these people are all Americans—are there any U.S.S.I.D 18 questions here?’ He said, ‘No, just transcribe them, that’s an order, transcribe everything.’” According to Faulk, the calls included intimate conversations both within the Green Zone and to people back in the U.S. “There were people having affairs inside the Green Zone, talking about their meet-ups, just all kinds of stuff. And he transcribed everything word for word, and it just disappeared into the big NSA black hole. These were military, civilians, contractors. A lot of these people were having personal phone calls, calling their families back home, having all kinds of personal discussions, and everything just disappeared somewhere; someone’s got it.” 

Faulk’s friend eventually told his warrant officer that he was troubled by the work. “After a few days he said he didn’t want to do it anymore, didn’t think it was right,” said Faulk. “So they got somebody else to do it. There is always somebody else who will do something like that. The whole agency down here, at least the way it operates in Georgia, there’s a lot of intimidation, everybody’s afraid of getting in trouble, and people just follow orders. They’re told, ‘Yeah, we already ran this by the legal department up at Meade and it’s kosher,’ and it may or may not be true . . . They generally aren’t told the reason for the order—they just say we’ve cleared this, it’s legal, so listen to it. I know about three cases where that was done . . . But people generally do what they’re told. That’s what really disturbed me down here with the whole discussion of warrant less wiretapping—if we wanted to just start tapping random Americans’ phones, I think we’d have enough workers willing to do that. I think it’s frightening. I think it’s very frightening.” 

In 2002, one of the Inmarsat phone calls picked up by the N.S.A came from a group of suspected terrorists crossing a vast expanse of desert in a remote part of Yemen. 

Assassination 

For years, one of the people near the top of the N.S.A’s target list was Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a native Yemeni suspected of belonging to al-Qaeda and of being one of the masterminds behind the attack on the USS Cole two years before. After listening to hours of tape recordings of his conversations, the small team assigned to locate al-Harethi was very familiar with the sound of his voice. But like most of the NSA’s targets, al-Harethi knew that the United States was searching for him with an electronic dragnet, hoping to snag a brief satellite phone call and pinpoint his location. As a result he always carried with him up to half a dozen phones, each with multiple cards that could change the number. The NSA had a list of at least some of the numbers, and because he was a high-priority target, an alarm would go off if one of them was used. 

On the afternoon of November 3, 2002, the alarm sounded, surprising one of the analysts on the team. “He knew this guy’s phone number and he [al-Harethi] hadn’t used it for a period of time—it was a satellite phone,” said one knowledgeable source. “Then it came up.” Using global positioning satellites, he was able to pinpoint al-Harethi in the Yemeni province of Mar’ib, a remote, sand-swept landscape controlled by well armed tribal chiefs and largely off-limits to Yemeni police. The analyst quickly contacted a C.I.A team based across the Red Sea in Djibouti. From the small country on the Horn of Africa, the C.I.A operated a battery of unmanned Predator drones, each armed with deadly Hell fire missiles. From there, the drones could easily reach anywhere in Yemen, where at least one was already on patrol. Thus, almost immediately the CIA in Djibouti began directing the Predator toward the target. 

But the NSA analyst, eavesdropping on the satellite call in near real time, was disappointed. Having listened to tapes of al-Harethi’s voice many times over the years, he was convinced the person on the other end of the phone was not him. “This guy is listening and he realizes it’s not the guy,” said the source. “And all of a sudden he hears like a six-second conversation and it’s the guy, he’s in the backseat and he’s giving the driver directions and it was picked up over the phone, and the analyst was that good that he heard over all the other stuff. He said, ‘That’s him.’ But because they have to have a dual recognition, he called in the second guy, they played the tape, and they said, ‘It’s him.’ Forty minutes later a Hell fire missile hit that car. The Predator was already up doing surveillance. The C.I.A said to the Predator team, ‘Here’s the general location—from N.S.A—that we have the satellite phone, go find the damn car and get the guy.’ Those analysts get that good, they can recognize the voice. The C.I.A took credit for that because it was a C.I.A Predator that fired the shot that killed the guy. But the way they killed him was an NSA analyst listening.” 

The black all-terrain vehicle instantly burst into a ball of flames, killing all five of the occupants and leaving little more than charred metal and a sprawling oil stain on the desert sand. Also in the car was Kamel Derwish, an American citizen who had grown up in the Buffalo suburb of Lackawanna, New York, emigrated with his family to Saudi Arabia, and returned to Lackawanna in the late 1990's. He later recruited half a dozen other American Muslims to travel to Afghanistan, where they took part in an al-Qaeda training camp in 2001, months before the attack on 9/11. 

It would be a milestone of sorts for the N.S.A—its first assassination. But it would not be the last. The agency created to passively eavesdrop on targets was now, with the C.I.A, actively assassinating targets. On January 13, 2006, for example, the N.S.A likely assisted the C.I.A in attempting to assassinate Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy. Unfortunately, the missiles missed Zawahiri and instead killed as many as eighteen civilians, many of them women and children, triggering protests throughout Pakistan. 

Assassinations carried out by intelligence employees had long been outlawed—by Presidents Ford, in 1976, and Reagan, in 1981. Also, a U.N report concerning the 2002 Yemen killing called the strike “an alarming precedent and a clear case of extrajudicial killing” in violation of international laws and treaties. But as he did with the warrant less eavesdropping program, Bush brushed aside the law and instead claimed that the authorization to kill suspected terrorists was vested in him under congressional war powers following the 9/11 attacks. 

By the time of the assassination, Hayden was well aware that war with Iraq was only months away, and he put his agency’s workforce on notice that they should be planning accordingly and not waiting for the bombs to start falling. Speaking on the N.S.A’s Top Secret/Codeword internal television show, Talk NSA, he said, “A Sigint agency can’t wait for the political decision.” He later told several subordinates, “It is my judgment in doing this for more than thirty years, I have never seen a condition like this when it didn’t end in war. We’re going to war.” 

In preparation, Hayden had the agency conduct what he called a “Rock Drill,” a term taken from old army exercises where rocks—signifying fortifications—were moved around on a map. In an agency more familiar with routers than rocks, the exercise focused mostly on “hearability”—where best to place remote sensors to pick up communications. At another point, Hayden had his graphics department produce a stoplight chart indicating the agency’s capabilities against various Iraqi targets. While much of northern and southern Iraq, where the U.S. had long been patrolling no-fly zones, was colored green, the Republican Guard was yellow—barely—and Saddam Hussein and his senior political and military leaders glowed bright red. 

But a key problem for the N.S.A in launching a war against Iraq, according to the former N.S.A director William O. Studeman, a navy vice admiral, was that the U.S. had already let Saddam Hussein know many of its secrets during the Iran-Iraq war. “Having had about four years’ or more worth of U.S. delivering intelligence to it with regard to Iran’s conduct of the war, Iraq had a substantial knowledge and sensitivity of our capabilities in the area of imaging and other intelligence collection methods such as signals intelligence. If you go back to the fundamental principles of intelligence, we had already failed on the first count. That is, our security had been penetrated because we were dealing with this target to whom we had spent so many years displaying what our intelligence capabilities were. Add the fact that Iraq is a very secretive country itself and places a great premium on security, and you then have a target that is probably the most denial-and-deception-oriented target that the U.S. has ever faced. It is a country that goes out of its way to create a large number of barriers to allowing any Western penetration of its capabilities and intentions.” 

With the war in Iraq approaching, the tension and stress levels at the Middle East listening post mounted. Kinne had been opposed to the war from the beginning, but Berry was gung ho in favor of it and volunteered for a second year at NSA Georgia. “I agreed to stay army because I’m as angry as any affected New Yorker about the murder of about 3,000 innocents on September 11, 2001,” he said. “Plus, because I’m an intelligence officer, I’m in a great position to avenge the holocaust I saw on TV that day.” “He bought everything,” said Kinne. “He thought Iraq was connected to 9/11.” 

As Kinne eavesdropped on Inmarsat communications, another group focused on a new competitor, an Arab communications satellite called Thuraya. Built by Boeing Satellite Systems and launched into orbit in October 2000, the satellite featured the world’s most powerful satellite digital communications processor. The heart and brain of the spacecraft, the processor was a product of both Boeing and I.B.M technology and enabled the spacecraft to handle up to tens of thousands of wireless phone calls simultaneously throughout the Middle East. Owned by Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications Co. Ltd., based in the United Arab Emirates, the satellite system was marketed aggressively in an attempt to both draw customers away from Inmarsat and create a regional demand for their small, blue handheld phones. The campaign worked well and within a few years there were more than 65,000 of the company’s phones in use and the minutes used per day were double the company’s expectations. 

Thuraya’s satellite quickly became a key target of the N.S.A. Soon after the September 11 attacks, in a major change, Hayden ordered that determining the location of callers and receivers suspected of involvement in terrorism be placed on a higher priority status than deciphering and translating the actual conversations. This was a result of the continuing difficulty in acquiring adequate numbers of competent translators, an inability to decipher many of their targets’ homemade verbal codes, and the need to quickly capture—or kill—suspected terrorists. Another factor was the growing use of encryption and the N.S.A’s inability, without spending excessive amounts of computer time and human energy, to solve commercial systems more complex than 256 bits. 

Fortunately for the N.S.A, among the people who communicated with the small blue phones, which could also be used for terrestrial mobile calls, were senior Iraqi officials. A key advantage for the spy agency was the fact that the phones contained Global Positioning System (G.P.S) chips that revealed their coordinates to the N.S.A. At Fort Meade, as the Bush administration began moving closer to its invasion of Baghdad, analysts studying intercepted Iraqi conversations were making progress. They successfully matched some of the phones to a number of senior officials and, at various times, were able to determine their locations within a broad geographic area. It was part of a plan to decapitate the Iraqi leadership at the start of the war. 

But despite the N.S.A’s enormous capabilities, as the rush to war began gathering steam, most of the intelligence that the N.S.A was able to pick up was ambiguous and far from solid with regard to weapons of mass destruction. “When I asked our best analysts to characterize our Sigint now, in comparison to the Humint [human intelligence], as an overall assessment, they characterized the Sigint as either ambiguous or confirmatory of the Humint,” said Hayden. At the time, however, there was very little Humint. Adding to the ambiguity problem was the fact that much of the equipment that Hussein was receiving and the U.S. was monitoring was dual-use—items that could be used for either innocent or nefarious purposes. Hayden’s Sigint analysts, he said, “brought up an additional fact that made this hard. Saddam was living under a sanction regime. Most commercial transactions which in other parts of the world would have been legitimate transactions were in many cases in Iraq violations of the sanctions. So an awful lot of commercial transactions were of an ambiguous nature that involved dual-use materials or dual-use equipment.” 

These transactions, said Hayden, “were conducted in an almost clandestine sort of way. Now, how do you distinguish that clandestine activity as evidence of pursuing W.M.D, as opposed to simply a reflection of living under a regime in which commercial transactions that otherwise would be viewed as normal here have to be conducted in a secretive sort of way? . . . When you’re looking at the evidence here, say you’re a Siginter [a signals intelligence analyst] and you’re looking at an intercept. It’s admittedly ambiguous—you may give country X the benefit of the doubt, but if country X is Iraq, this is a guy who you know has lied about his weapons of mass destruction program, so there’s a tendency here to be suspicious about even ambiguous activity.” 

Despite the doubts, Hayden raised no objections to the preparations for war and on January 13, he brought several hundred of the agency’s senior managers together in the Friedman Auditorium for a highly secret “town meeting.” Concerned about the criticism the agency received during the first Gulf War that valuable Sigint was never distributed beyond Washington, Hayden said this time that wouldn’t happen. This time, he said, there needed to be a much greater effort to get key intelligence immediately to the soldiers on the front line, where it could then be acted upon immediately. 

Then Hayden issued a formal “Statement of Director’s Intent” for the war. “If directed,” it said in part, “I intend to conduct a Sigint . . . operation that will meet the combatant commanders’ objective of shock, speed, and awe while also providing policy makers information that is actionable and timely . . . We will push intelligence to those places it needs to be. I expect leaders at every level to actively remove obstacles to dissemination.” One method of moving the Sigint immediately to the battlefield was through a new instant messaging system code-named Zircon. 

Next Hayden turned his attention, and his agency’s giant ears, toward the United Nations. Three months earlier, the Bush administration won support for its war from both houses of Congress. With the country largely convinced, Bush reluctantly went along with Secretary of State Colin Powell’s recommendation to convince the rest of the world through a United Nations resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. As the vote on the resolution approached, Hayden intensified his eavesdropping on the UN, and especially Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the Security Council. 

According to Annan’s predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “From the first day I entered my office they said, ‘Beware, your office is bugged, your residence is bugged, and it is a tradition that the member states who have the technical capacity to bug will do it without any hesitation.’ That would involve members of the Security Council. The perception is that you must know in advance that your office, your residence, your car, your phone is bugged.” 

In England, Member of Parliament Claire Short, a former member of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet, set off a storm when she admitted that in the weeks prior to the launch of the Iraq war she had read secret transcripts of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s confidential conversations. The transcripts were likely made by the N.S.A and shared with its sister British eavesdropping agency, G.C.H.Q, which passed them on to the prime minister’s office. 

“The UK in this time was also spying on Kofi Annan’s office and getting reports from him about what was going on,” said Short. She added, “These things are done. And in the case of Kofi’s office, it’s been done for some time . . . I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan’s conversations. In fact, I have had conversations with Kofi in the run-up to war, thinking, ‘Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying.’ ” 

N.S.A was also eavesdropping intensely on the undecided members of the UN Security Council. On November 8, 2002, the members passed Resolution 1441, warning of “serious consequences” if Iraq did not take a “final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.” To Washington, that translated into an authorization to launch its war against Iraq if they failed to comply fully, but London disagreed. With a population far less supportive of military action against Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government suggested that a second resolution, specifically authorizing war, would be required before the launch of an all-out UN-backed invasion. Reluctantly, primarily as a favor to his friend Blair, Bush agreed to the recommendation. 

By late January the Bush and Blair administrations had determined that Iraq had failed to fully disarm and as a result they were putting tremendous pressure on the uncommitted members of the Security Council to vote in favor of its tough go-to-war resolution. On the other side, arguing against the war, were France, Germany, and Russia. Thus the “Middle Six” on the Council, as they became known—Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea, and Pakistan—suddenly became top candidates for America’s friendship, and key targets for the N.S.A’s eavesdropping. 

The NSA was like a cheat at a poker game; knowing what cards were in other players’ hands would give the United States a critical advantage. By listening in as the delegates communicated back to their home countries, the N.S.A would be able to discover which way they might vote, which positions they favored or opposed, and what their negotiating positions would be. The agency also could pick up indications of what they needed, such as a highway, a dam, or a favorable trade deal, and, in a subtle form of bribery, the U.S. could provide the country with a generous “aid package” to help pay for the construction. 

Among the things that the NSA tapped into was a secret meeting of the Middle Six, who were seeking, in a last-ditch effort, to come up with a compromise resolution to avert the war in Iraq by giving the weapons inspectors more time to finish their work. According to former Mexican ambassador to the UN Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, the Americans somehow learned of the meeting and intervened. They could only have learned of the plan, said Zinser, as a result of electronic surveillance. As soon as the Americans found out about the meeting, Zinser claimed, “they said, ‘You should know that we don’t like the idea and we don’t like you to promote it.’ ” 

Having already won over the U.S. Congress and the American public, the Bush administration was not about to let a half dozen Third World countries get between them and their war. Thus, on January 31, the N.S.A ratcheted up its targeting of the Middle Six. Frank Koza, the Sigint department’s deputy chief of staff for Regional Targets, sent a Top Secret/Codeword memo to the NSA’s Five Eyes partners in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand asking for help: 

As you’ve likely heard by now, the Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (U.N.S.C) members (minus US and GBR [Great Britain] of course) for insights as to how membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/dependencies, etc.— the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises. 

Koza added, “I suspect that you’ll be hearing more along these lines in formal channels—especially as this effort will probably peak (at least for this specific focus) in the middle of next week, following the Sec.State’s [Secretary of State Colin Powell’s] presentation to the U.N.S.C.” It was during that address by Powell that the Bush administration would make its last major argument before launching the war—and the N.S.A was to play a leading role in the presentation. 

War 

Like Hollywood producers, the White House Iraq Group (W.H.I.G) was looking for a media spectacular to sell not just the American public but the rest of the skeptical world on the need to go to war with Iraq. The answer was to replay the scene from the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Kennedy administration U.N ambassador Adlai Stevenson went on television to confront his Soviet counterpart in the Security Council over ballistic missiles in Cuba. While the whole world watched, Stevenson proved the Russians were hiding weapons of mass destruction on Castro’s island. Four decades later, the role of Stevenson would be played by Secretary of State Colin Powell, backed up by a twenty-first-century sound and light show. As probably the most widely trusted member of the Bush administration, Powell would be the perfect choice and the Security Council the ideal venue to sell the W.H.I.G’s spurious claims against Iraq. 

On February 5, 2003, Powell took his seat at the round Security Council table and made his case to the world. It was a powerful and convincing performance, particularly because of his assertive language and lack of qualifiers. “My colleagues,” he said, “every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” He began with what he likely thought would be the most dramatic and convincing evidence by playing actual NSA intercepts of Iraq military personnel. 

“What you’re about to hear is a conversation that my government monitored. It takes place on November 26 of last year, on the day before United Nations teams resumed inspections in Iraq. The conversation involves two senior officers, a colonel and a brigadier general, from Iraq’s elite military unit, the Republican Guard.” On the first intercept, the colonel says, “We have this modified vehicle . . . What do we say if one of them sees it?” He notes that it is from the al-Kindi company. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll come to you in the morning. I have some comments. I’m worried you all have something left.” 

A second intercept, recorded on January 30, 2003, involves a conversation between Republican Guard headquarters and an officer in the field. “There is a directive of the Republican Guard chief of staff at the conference today,” says headquarters. “They are inspecting the ammunition you have . . . for the possibility there are forbidden ammo . . . We sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there . . . After you have carried out what is contained in the message, destroy the message.” The officer agrees. 

And a third intercept, said Powell, “shows a captain in the Second Corps of the Republican Guard being ordered by a colonel to ‘remove the expression “nerve agents” from wireless instructions.’ ” 

In years of monitoring Iraqi communications, that was the best the N.S.A had—comments about a “modified vehicle,” an order to get rid of some “forbidden ammo,” and an order to “remove the expression ‘nerve agents’ from wireless instructions.” Even NSA director Hayden agreed that they were little more than ambiguous. “We were asked, what do you have,” said Hayden in an interview. “And we surfaced several, including these three . . . If you take a textual analysis of that, they are ambiguous. That said, you don’t have to be a dishonest or intellectually handicapped person to be very suspicious about when the guy’s saying remove all references to this from your code books, or the other guy saying ‘I’ve got one of the modified vehicles here.’ ” 

Asked “Modified in what way?” Hayden said, “Well, we don’t know. That’s the ambiguity. So we went ahead and played them . . . In my heart, each one of them individually could be explained away as this, that, or the other. Collectively they made a reasonably good package . . . Now you say they’re ambiguous. And I admit that, yeah, I can intellectualize and you can explain away some of these things . . . For example, let’s just take the one about removing all references to ‘nerve agents’ in your code books. If I’m innocent and I’m on the other side of the fence,I might say, ‘Oh, give me a break, for God’s sake, we all have code books, we all need references in it; you tell me you don’t have code words for nerve agents on the battlefield. All modern armies have those code words, you idiots.’ ” 

In fact, given the obvious ambiguity of the intercepts, Hayden was surprised that the Iraqis did not argue that case more strongly. “They didn’t do that. What they said was, these are third-class forgeries that any high school student can fabricate. That was very interesting to me, because rather than taking the textual criticism and attacking the intercepts on their merits, or lack of merit, they dismissed them as forgeries. I just looked at it and said, ‘Well, why are you going down that track?’ It lessened the sense of ambiguity. Whatever lingering sense of ambiguity about these intercepts was in my mind got lessened by the Iraqi government’s response to it.” 

Even within Powell’s small task force, the N.S.A intercepts—the most dramatic evidence they had—was looked upon as ambiguous. “If Captain Hindi with a Republican Guard unit was saying, ‘Take nerve agents out of his C.E.O.I—out of his communicating instructions,’ ” said a senior official, “that could have a double meaning. I mean, we took it as having a meaning that they didn’t want the inspectors to know they had nerve agents. But it could be the other side of the coin, too they got rid of them, so they’re taking it out of the C.E.O.I because they don’t need it anymore.” 

But the public was never told how weak and ambiguous the best evidence was. They would be told the opposite. In addition to hearing the intercepts, Powell brought up the frightening topic of biological weapons. “Saddam Hussein has investigated dozens of biological agents, causing diseases such as gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camel pox, and hemorrhagic fever. And he also has the wherewithal to develop smallpox.” Then he warned, “One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq’s biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.” 

Finally, at 3:15 a.m. on March 20, 2003, an iron rain began to fall over Baghdad and the first of 29,199 bombs plunged toward earth. The Bush administration would call it “shock and awe.” Six thousand miles away, the friction between Kinne and Berry continued as they listened to the bombs explode. “During shock and awe he [Berry] said, ‘We’re going to bomb those barbarians back to kingdom come,’ ” said Kinne. Berry then sent an e-mail to everyone in the Highlander unit in which he meant to write, “We’re going to hit them with a fury of bombs during shock and awe.” But he ended up saying “furry” instead of “fury.” “It was hilarious,” said Kinne. 

Sitting at her station, Kinne was listening to several American N.G.O aid workers trying to get to safety and giving their position every few minutes to their headquarters. “That night, around the time of the initial invasion, I heard two Americans traveling somewhere in the region and they kept calling their main office because they were checking in and so they kept giving them updates on their location because they were kind of afraid. So I was monitoring them because I . . . would send out KL [high priority “Klieg Light”] reports updating their location—to whoever our consumers were.” Kinne hoped the reports might warn of an attack in their area. 

About the same time, an intercepted fax came in from the Iraqi National Congress, a group led by the Iraqi dissident Ahmed Chalabi. Close to the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, he had been pressing the U.S. government for years to launch a war against Iraq so he could replace Saddam Hussein as the country’s leader. It was later discovered that much of his “evidence” that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was fraudulent. “The fax came in, the analyst printed it off, gave it to me, I looked at it, and I could see that it said something about missiles,” Kinne said. 

Focusing on the two lost Americans, Kinne ignored the fax. “Part of me said that if we were going to be monitoring Americans, then if they need help that I was going to make sure I did whatever I could to see to that. So at the end of shift I told the people who were coming on mids [midnight shift]—that was around eleven o’clock at night—that these people were calling in, they were calling in every fifteen, twenty minutes for a while. And I also told them there was this fax. Well, they didn’t get to the fax, and it wasn’t till the next day on the day shift that somebody started translating the fax.” 

It turned out that the fax contained more allegations by Chalabi about supposed locations for weapons of mass destruction—information that should have been sent out immediately as a CRITIC, the NSA’s highest-priority message, designed to reach the president’s desk within five minutes. “So we all get called in because they realize the nature of what the fax was,” said Kinne, “where all the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were. This . . . got sent via CRITIC to the White House.” In her defense, Kinne pointed out Chalabi’s lack of credibility. “I made a point of saying to Mr. Berry, ‘Just because this is all written down in a fax does not mean it’s true. Why are we acting as if it’s black and white and this is actually reflective of reality?’ And that’s when he said, ‘You’re not an analyst, you’re an interceptor, and it’s not your job to decide whether or not the intelligence is accurate, it’s your job to collect.’ ” 

Kinne later thought the entire incident was very suspicious. “It’s really weird,” she said, “because the fax—we had a lot of faxes that came in and we only had so many linguists so we didn’t always get to faxes and a lot of times they would come and go and nobody ever said anything.” The Chalabi message, she said, was the first time “where somebody called them and asked them what was going on with the fax . . . It was somehow called to the attention of people and [they were] asked where’s this fax? Now I almost wonder if our government was telling the I.N.C how to frigging pass information so we could intercept it . . . I just don’t doubt that they could have done it intentionally just to get propaganda in the military . . . So when I got out of the military, and sometime in the beginning of 2004, I think I was at the gym and I was reading a Newsweek or U.S. News and World Report or something and there was a little blurb in there that said that we had determined that the I.N.C had been feeding us misinformation about Iraq, and I just immediately thought about the CRITIC, and immediately your blood goes cold and you realize that it was all a bunch of bullshit.” 

That same night, Kinne discovered that among the locations on the military’s target list during shock and awe was the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, the main residence for journalists covering the war. As she eavesdropped, she could hear the frightened journalists calling home or calling in stories to their editors back in the States and thought someone should tell the military to avoid bombing the location. “During shock and awe,” said Kinne, the journalists in the hotel were “calling family members in the States or even their employers or coworkers and talking about, just the fact that they were really concerned for their safety. And I don’t even remember why we would have been given a potential target list but I just remember seeing the Palestine Hotel listed, and I knew there were journalists staying at the Palestine Hotel that thought they were safe. I went to Mr. Berry and said there are journalists staying there, they think they’re safe, but it’s a potential target, shouldn’t somebody do something or say something? And he just kind of blew me off. He said somebody else, further up the chain, knows what they’re doing.” 

At another point, Kinne was eavesdropping on a conversation between American and British aid workers. “The Brit, clear as day, said, ‘Be careful because the Americans are listening.’ And the American said, ‘No, they’re not; I’m protected by U.S.S.I.D 18; they can’t spy on me; I’m an American.’ That set off all the red alarms and people just went ape,” calling it a major breach of security because uncleared civilians were not supposed to know about the NSA document. 

Without any intelligence agents on the ground at the start of the conflict, the military was forced to rely on the N.S.A to locate members of Saddam Hussein’s regime. But the agency had already found that Thuraya’s G.P.S system was only accurate within a one-hundred-meter radius—more than three football fields. Thus the geo-location of the caller could be anywhere within a vast 31,400-square-meter area, much of it densely packed urban neighborhoods. This meant that killing Iraqi officials with Tomahawk cruise missiles and two-thousand-pound penetration bombs was less a matter of precision targeting and more like firing blindly into very large crowds. While the weapons landed exactly where they were supposed to, not a single senior Iraqi official was hit—a 100 percent failure rate. Instead, large numbers of Iraqi civilians were killed. 

While almost everything Operation Highlander received was unencrypted, Kinne did occasionally intercept a voice message that was simply a person reading a long series of coded letters and numbers. “At some point we started getting code, picking up conversations that were just code,” she said. Those messages had to be sent to NSA headquarters for deciphering. “They wouldn’t send us the key, so we weren’t allowed to translate them ourselves or break the code. The mission before, in ’96, they gave our analysts the key so they could break it themselves.” One of those alphanumeric messages sent to the N.S.A was eventually returned, and Kinne was surprised by what it revealed. “One of the codes was Saddam Hussein’s location. We collected it before he was captured, but they didn’t tell us what the code broke out to until after he was captured. So I have no idea if that location was at all instrumental in his actual capture.” 

After Kinne intercepted calls, another group nearby used the phone numbers to create large charts in an attempt to find hidden links between them, a technique known as “call chaining analysis.” “They would go through and they would do telephone diagrams of who was calling which numbers and kind of do these huge elaborate Inmarsat telephone diagrams,” said Kinne. To do the call chaining, the analysts use a program known as Pattern Tracer, made by i2 Inc., a company in McLean, Virginia. “When suspected terrorists go to great lengths to disguise their call activity, Pattern Tracer can be used to find hidden connections in volumes of call record data,” says the company. 

In addition to Pattern Tracer, the analysts at NSA Georgia have an alphabet soup of data mining, traffic analysis, and social network analysis tools—secret and unclassified—within their computers. They include Agility, AMHS, Anchory, ArcView, Fastscope, Hightide, Hombase, Intelink, Octave, Document Management Center, Dishfire, CREST, Pinwale, COASTLINE, SNACKS, Cadence, Gamut, Mainway, Marina, Osis, Puzzle cube, Surrey, Tuning fork, Xkeyscore, and Unified Tasking Tool. The N.S.A also maintains large databases containing the address information, known as externals, on millions of intercepted messages, such as the Externals Data Global Exploitation (E.D.G.E) database, the Communication External Notation list, and the Communications Externals Data Repository and Integration Center. 

Kinne saw little in the way of major accomplishments by the Highlander operation. “I think I have some sense that we did get one al-Qaeda network over the course of the time, but I don’t, I’m not really as familiar with that,” she said. In her entire time there, the only CRITIC message sent out was the one from Chalabi; none were issued concerning terrorism or al-Qaeda. 

“I am greatly fearful of what has been happening with our country, and our Constitution,” concluded Kinne. “And I just kind of saw in those two years of service how things drastically and dramatically changed for the worse. Part of me will always regret not having upheld my oath of military service to the fullest extent that I should have. You know as a soldier we take an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” 

In Iraq, following the collapse of the government and the start of the American occupation, the NSA set up a large antenna farm within the Green Zone. Although there is no name on the compound, its nickname is Camp Alec, apparently derived from the C.I.A’s bin Laden unit. About one hundred yards long and fifty yards wide, the facility consisted of four single-story buildings with double, bomb-proof roofs and a high tower containing a number of microwave horns and high-frequency antennas. Also within the compound, which was surrounded by two high steel fences, were a pair of medium-sized satellite dishes. The entire compound was part of an overall N.S.A security program code-named Viper. 

The key targets were the thousands of cell phones within Baghdad and the surrounding areas, many of which were used by the growing numbers of insurgents as they planted roadside bombs. Once the intercepts were captured by the antennas, they were zapped into one of the four windowless buildings. “Where the information goes is a bank of computers,” said one person who worked at the site. “We were under mortar attack there quite a bit.” The data would then be transmitted both to the N.S.A’s headquarters within the Green Zone, co-located with the C.I.A’s offices, and also to N.S.A Georgia, where most of the analysis would take place. According to the source, “The data collected provides the Joint Special Operations Command with about 75 percent of the actionable intelligence that they’re using to hit sites in Iraq.” 

“You would transcribe it word for word and then after the word melon you put a little ‘op comment’ in, to the effect that ‘in terms of voice inflection it does not seem this guy is truly talking about melons.’ It comes down to inflection, a lot of gut reaction to things,” said Faulk. “The problem is, we never really got good feedback, post-mission feedback, about whether the targeted people were actually truly guilty of terrorist acts. After the house was blown up, did you indeed find weapons and bombs in it? You get these guys calling between one another using cover terms and speaking around issues. So you always run the risk that you’ll kill some innocent people who really are selling melons and not I.E.D's. There’s a guy going with a truck of melons somewhere and someone has to make the call—this is what really is kind of heart-wrenching about the thing— somebody has to make the call whether the guy moving melons is really moving melons or not. And you get a guy eight thousand miles away in a cubicle and he’s supposed to know these things. It left me thinking we killed a lot of innocent people, but I have no real way of knowing . . . A lot of people don’t really care about that . . . And that was one of the reasons I got out—to actually have to do that and know that people are going to live or die based on that is something I just can’t live with. It’s not the kind of mistake I want to make.” 

Despite the importance of Iraq to the Bush administration, few senior N.S.A officials ever left the comfort of their eighth-floor suite of offices and visited the war zone. One exception was Eric Haseltine, the iconoclastic former Disney imagineer who was brought aboard as assistant director for research to shake up the agency’s institutional thinking. “Hayden wanted to really get an out-of-the-box person in there,” said Haseltine, “so he got a headhunter to find a really out-of-the-box person, and I guess he figured he couldn’t get more out-of-the-box than Disney.” 

It was an odd mix at the start, but Haseltine quickly fit it. “I was told that I was an alien,” he said. “In some ways I fit in because I was a geek and it’s an agency of geeks—you’re either a linguist geek or a math or computer geek; and so one geek will resonate with another geek.” He quickly earned his geek credentials when during a meeting he mentioned, “Cherenkov radiation is inherently vectorized so that you have an acceptance cone.” According to Haseltine, “When I said vectorized Cherenkov radiation, I was a geek—I wasn’t just a suit.” 

Haseltine found a wide gap in the cultures at the C.I.A and the N.S.A. “CIA is a very people-oriented place. It’s a comfortable place to be—they have fabrics from around the world and objets d’art—it’s a people-friendly place. N.S.A is a machine-friendly place. It’s raised floors and converging lines of parallax down naked hallways forever. You tend to get a lot more extroverts at C.I.A who are good salesmen. At C.I.A you have people who are street smart, and at N.S.A you have people who are think smart.” And because of the way technology was dominating most aspects of life today, “the future was pushing most intelligence missions toward Fort Meade.” 

“If you’re talking about Russia, Humint is really important,” said Haseltine. “If you’re talking about al-Qaeda, Humint ought to be important, but Sigint turns out to be more important. If I’m a terrorist in Syria and wanted to communicate with a terrorist in Tehran and I’m using AOL or Hotmail, my conversation would go through Reston, Virginia, or Seattle. Geography is dead. We may have physical borders, but cyberspace does not recognize them.” Eavesdropping, he said, is not the issue; the difficulty for the NSA is sorting through it all. “Our ability to collect stuff far outstrips our ability to understand what we collect—and that is the central problem, that is the core problem. What’s probably surprising to most people—you know they think, how do we tap this cable or have a big antenna and scoop up these transmissions—that is so much not the problem.” 

Soon after he arrived, Haseltine was on a plane to Baghdad to view the agency from the perspective of the battlefield. “The wars we are in today are intelligence wars,” he said. “And so if you believe that Sigint is number one, then the syllogism says N.S.A becomes the most important part of the war.” He was surprised by what he found. “I spent a lot of time in Iraq. I went there three times when I was at N.S.A. The second time I came back from Iraq, I sat down with General Hayden and I said, ‘Sir, there’s good news and there’s bad news. At corps level and above, everybody loves you. At division and below, they hate you like you wouldn’t believe.’ He had never heard that before from anybody. And the reason is there was no N.S.A presence below corps. The N.S.A information went down to a certain level and stopped. So the stuff that comes in at the top doesn’t percolate down to the bottom.” 

Haseltine, who at the time was equal to a two-star general, received a shock on his first trip to the war zone. “I sat down in a lieutenant colonel’s office in Baghdad who was in charge of intelligence for that division,” he recalled. “And I said, ‘Colonel, I’m here to help you help me help you.’ And he said, ‘Get the fuck out of my office.’ I said I’ll get out, but first tell me why. He said you’re a mucky muck at NSA; you guys are such assholes. He knows I’m the associate director of the agency—he didn’t care. He said, ‘You guys are the huge rusty gear, and we’re the fast gear and there’s no way your gears are going to engage in our gears and help us.’ He says get out of here. You’re just big and slow and bureaucratic. N.S.A had a very bad reputation below the senior levels because they never saw value from it. And it wasn’t necessarily N.S.A’s fault. That’s the interesting thing. Was it the N.S.A’s fault that the army chose not to share information down below the top echelon? But NSA got blamed for it.” They didn’t hate Hayden; they hated the NSA. 

One of the colonel’s major complaints was that he wanted the N.S.A to send him copies of the raw, untranslated, and unanalyzed intercepts, something the agency very rarely does. “They wanted the raw data,” said Haseltine. “They said, ‘Hey, you’ve collected some, you give it to us, we’ll do the analysis.’ Here’s a couple of things he didn’t understand. What if we gave you the raw transcripts in some dialect of Arabic? How many Arabic linguists do you have? Your worst nightmare would be if we gave you our whole collection. They didn’t understand at least two things. One is that there is just unbelievable amounts of information— they would never have a prayer of finding their way through it. Number two, do they have the analysts to chomp on it? No way. Number three, there are legitimate legal issues involved.” 

Rather than give them the data, Hayden decided to assign an agency analyst to the division—it was a procedure the agency began repeating throughout government. “The bottom line is if you wanted to help somebody, you couldn’t give them data, you had to give them a person, you had to give them a human body, because that person knew how to cope with information, and that person had the authority to give the information. So in my mind, N.S.A was transforming more from a product business to a service business. That was a paradigm shift that was going on, and I think I did help accelerate that with my conversations with General Hayden.” 

Despite his progress in integrating the N.S.A into the front lines, Haseltine made few friends and many enemies with this unorthodox approach. At a very senior meeting, the deputy director of a large intelligence agency—he wouldn’t say whether it was the N.S.A or not— told him: “You know, Haseltine, you’ve got a bad reputation,” he said. “You’re a sub cabinet-level official and you go out talking to sergeants in Iraq. You short-circuit way too many chains of command to ever get our cooperation.” 

With the U.S. in charge of rewiring Iraq’s entire communications infrastructure, the N.S.A had a unique opportunity to turn the entire country into one giant acoustic bug. By 2008, over $1 billion in U.S. and Iraqi reconstruction funds and approximately $6 billion in private-sector investment had been spent on developing the national telecom architecture. This included six buried fiber-optic loops and a microwave network running north to south from Dohuk to Basra and west to east from the Jordanian border through Baghdad to Diyala Province and onward to Kirkuk and Sulaimaniya. Contracts were also given to interconnect the country with both FLAG Falcon and FOG 2 undersea cable systems. “What can be more important for Iraq today than a modern communications infrastructure?” said Minister of Communications Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi. “It is the technology thread that weaves our country together.” 

Yet despite this opportunity, more than five years after the war began the N.S.A may be as deaf to the actions of the Iraqi government as when Saddam Hussein was in power. For example, when Iraqi prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki launched his military attack on the radical anti American cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s forces in Basra in March 2008, the C.I.A, the White House, and the commanders on the ground in Iraq were all caught completely by surprise. “You didn’t know it was going to happen?” asked host Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press. “No more so than Dave Petraeus or Ambassador Crocker did,” said Hayden, now the director of the CIA. 

Among the highest priority intelligence operations within Iraq was the effort to locate computers used by the government of Saddam Hussein, remove the hard drives, and then send the drives to the C.I.A and N.S.A for forensic examination, translation, and analysis. The hope was to find either the locations where the weapons of mass destruction were supposedly hidden or Saddam Hussein’s hideout. But with few capable Arabic linguists available and an equally scarce number of highly cleared computer experts, the operation produced a great deal of chaos and confusion but very little actionable intelligence. As a result, the C.I.A began paying out millions of dollars to scores of private companies, both long-established giants and small start-ups. Nicknamed “beltway bandits” because many had offices around the Interstate 495 beltway circling Washington, these contractors would recruit current and former CIA and NSA employees at up to double their salaries. 

Once on board, they were frequently assigned back to the same offices at C.I.A and N.S.A doing the same work, but now the taxpayers were paying them up to twice as much. Others were assigned even less sophisticated work than they were originally performing. Because of the slapdash nature of the rush to expand, the quality of intelligence produced by some of those contractors quickly became questionable. “The money is incredible—I doubled my salary to go out and come back in and continue doing what I was doing,” said one former C.I.A official who had been assigned to the Directorate of Operations (D.O), now called the National Clandestine Service. “They’re all former DO officers, and basically what these companies are doing, they have this net, and all these people trickling out of the agency, they’re just catching them. It’s like fruit on the ground, because the agency doesn’t have the people that they need to do these jobs. But the problem is these jobs are mindless—because once again there’s no structure applied to the task at hand. So we’re all just sitting there looking at each other, and we’re making a ridiculous amount of money.” 

According to one senior intelligence official, “The D.O’s chunk of the budget inside the CIA is now bigger than the entire CIA budget was when Bush came to office. Nobody can tell you [whether] what you’re getting is any good or not. They’re paying so much money to third-party countries for stuff, it’s incredible. I don’t think anybody even knows, really, how much money we’re giving Pakistan.” 

Because much of the data in the hard drives was in Arabic or other languages that few analysts read or spoke, often the information simply collected dust. “The first contract I was on I left, because I said this is fraud,” said a C.I.A officer turned contractor. “There was over a million dollars sitting in that [C.I.A] office—just the [contractor] salary we collected, not to mention the extra money that goes to these companies. We sat there all day and same-timed each other, which is like instant messaging. We would just same-time each other all day. And after about three months of that, I went to my company and I said you need to get me off this contract or I’m going to another company or I’m leaving altogether. Basically what we were doing,” he said, “is we were looking for any ops leads in these hard drives—through e-mail—things that were found residually on hard drives. Anything you do in the computer is somewhere engraved in a hard drive, and so we could look for tools to mine . . . Sometimes we got hard drives that were probably a couple of weeks old, because these are hard drives from where we went out and either rendered people or we raided places and we would just scoop up—not we, but the agents who were out there—the military would just scoop up hard drives in a big old Santa Claus bag and send them back.” 

The problem came when the information was not in English, which was most of the time. According to the contractor: 

A lot of it was in Arabic, and none of us spoke Arabic—just a little problem. It would just sit there. But none of us really knew what we were doing, and we had management who didn’t know what they were doing either. The problem is, and I just can’t stress enough what the agency [C.I.A] does to tackle their problems—they just throw people and money at the issue. It doesn’t matter what the outcome is, it doesn’t matter what the product of that is. It’s just comforting to them to know that in this office next to me, he’s got twenty people sitting there—doesn’t matter what they’re doing, but we’ve got them sitting there and that makes me feel like I’m getting something done, you know, that we’re tackling this problem. 

After September 11 happened, I think working from a position of chaos is understandable, because we were all shell-shocked. Everybody was, like, sleeping at the agency; we’ll read traffic, we’ll put out cables—whatever you want—we’ll man telephones. There was a lot of momentum for out-of-box kind of thinking and freethinking and everything else. But it was a very chaotic time, and what we were able to accomplish was probably very good given what we were working under. Two years after September 11, it’s not acceptable to continue to be working from that same position of chaos, because we haven’t stepped back—we let the momentum carry us along, but we fell back on the old ways of doing things, which is just shove people on the problem. 

According to the former official turned contractor, the surge in staffing the agency’s Counter terrorism Center (C.T.C) left many of the agency’s area divisions around the world depleted. Because of the “need to surge hundreds and hundreds at C.T.C,” he said, “there’s nobody in these area divisions anymore, everybody’s working the CT target. Africa Division is smaller now than the number of people we have in Baghdad. The entire division. And the people in Baghdad are just sitting.” 

Afghanistan has also proved difficult for the CIA, according to a number of current and former agency officials. One said: 

We were talking to teams in the field who were in Afghanistan every night. I was working the night shift all the time, and I would talk to the guys because that’s when they were awake and doing things. [They were] using a secure phone via Inmarsat, and then we have a S.T.U [Secure Telephone Unit] on the other end—we had several teams. I would ask, “What’s going on? How are you all doing?” They weren’t doing anything. And they were so frustrated. 

People were leaving . . . There was one team that just left, they just up and left, because they were going to be extended and they had already stayed over their stay or whatever, and they had sent messages saying we’re not doing anything here, and we’ve got family, and we have jobs, and we hear now that you’re thinking of extending us—and this was probably a day before the helicopter was supposed to come and take them away. They got on that helicopter and they left. 

Their job was to collect intelligence. But this is what was happening—you’d go into this village and you’d have ten or fifteen people come up to you and go, “I know where bin Laden is.” So you give them a hundred bucks and you never see them again. [The informants were also given a handheld G.P.S to pinpoint exact locations.] The G.P.S was to be taken to wherever bin Laden was, and they would write down the latitude and longitude. And so a lot of cable traffic has come and gone based on all of this information, from all of these people who come in and say they know where bin Laden is. 

And of course, they don’t—they want the money. Or if someone does in all good faith, they only heard it through a cousin who heard it from their cousin who heard it from a cousin who heard it from a cousin. It’s so ineffective. I’m not saying that that’s not the right way to go about it, but what I am saying is it’s not working . . . Let’s think of another way to do that. Because the war in Iraq, which the Pentagon had promised would be over quickly—followed by happy, cheering crowds—instead quickly dissolved into a quagmire, the C.I.A was caught short. Instead of the eighty-five Clandestine Service officers it had originally planned to send, it was forced to rush to the battlefield four times that number. 

Soon more than three hundred full-time case officers were packing the Baghdad station and more than half a dozen outlying bases. Overall, CIA personnel in the country soared to more than five hundred—including contractors—eclipsing even the Saigon station at the height of the Vietnam War more than three decades earlier. Despite the surge, quantity did not translate into quality. Many of the new arrivals had little or no training in the right languages, interrogation skills, or trade craft. Even a year into the war, the total number of C.I.A employees fluent in Arabic was still only eighty-three, and many of them spoke a dialect not used on the streets in Iraq. 

This required the C.I.A to become heavily dependent on outside translators, a problematic situation in terms of both security and effectiveness. Thus, there was little improvement in penetrating Iraqi resistance forces or learning who was behind the insurgency. To make up for the green arrivals, the C.I.A was forced to turn to hundreds of volunteers from its reserve force of home bound retirees, many of whom have long been away from the field and are of limited usefulness. Also, because they are rotated in and out so quickly—often for just ninety days at a time—there is little time to accomplish much. The confusion has also had a detrimental effect on the agency’s relationship with a number of regional Iraqi leaders who have become frustrated over their inability to establish liaison relations with C.I.A officers. According to one former case officer who still maintains close ties to the agency, the CIA was stretched to the limit. “With Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, with Iraq, I think they’re just sucking wind,” he said. 

Among the other handicaps faced by the station is the endless violence that has forced the agency to require that all employees leaving secure facilities be accompanied by an armed bodyguard. Under such conditions, developing sources and conducting clandestine meetings are all but impossible. “How do you do your job that way?” asked one former CIA official who had spent time in Iraq. “They don’t know what’s going on out there.” 

In addition to fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the NSA was also doing battle on a third front: the homeland. And for that they needed the secret and illegal cooperation of the telecommunications industry. 

Next

Book 3

Cooperation

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