PART 4:BODY OF SECRETS: EYES

An inside look at the Cuban Missile crisis,revealing things the American public was not privy to.

CHAPTER FIVE 

EYES 

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Two hundred miles north of Washington, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, shipfitters riveted steel seams together and welded joints in place. Blue sparks flew about and industrial pounding filled the air. Men in hard hats cut, straightened, and shaped large metal plates, and electricians strung miles of wire like endless strands of black knitting yarn. In a long, boxy dry dock, welder's torches were bringing back to life the rusting skeleton and gray skin of a ship long discarded. 

Like an early baby boomer, the SS Samuel R. Aitken was launched in Portland, Maine, on July 31, 1945. Named for an Irishman who came to the United States at the turn of the century and later became an executive with Moore-McCormack Lines, the Aitken was one of the mass produced cargo vessels known as Liberty ships. Because it arrived too late for the war, it instead spent a few years hauling freight from port to port under the colors of Moore-McCormack. But after only three years in service, the Aitken was given early retirement and sent to a nautical boneyard in Wilmington, Delaware. 

Now, under a heavy cloak of secrecy, the Samuel R. Aitken was being called back into service, but this time as a spy. 

About the same time that John F. Kennedy was elected president, NSA director John Samford's tour ended with considerably more attention than it began. Just before his scheduled retirement in November 1960, the agency suffered the worst scandal in its history when two of its analysts, William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, defected to Moscow. As a result of the defection, NSA's organizational structure was quickly changed. ADVA and GENS were combined into A Group, the largest organization, focusing on all analysis of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. ACOM became B Group, responsible for China, Korea, Vietnam, and the rest of Communist Asia, as well as Cuba. And ALLO was transformed into G Group, which tackled the communications of the rest of the world. The remainder of NSA was similarly organized. Despite other spy scandals, this system would remain unchanged until well into the 1990s. 

Vice Admiral Laurence Hugh (Jack) Frost, a 1926 Annapolis graduate who once served as chief of staff at NSA, replaced Samford. When he arrived, NSA's headquarters at Fort Meade had grown to 8,000 people and was eating up a larger and larger slice of the intelligence pie. By then the overall U.S. intelligence budget reached $2 billion; the Department of Defense accounted for $1.4 billion, most of which went to NSA. Thin and silver-haired, the admiral, soon after taking office, proclaimed that NSA was a ship and ordered a 75-foot, 3,100-pound flagpole installed with his personal flag so people would know that he was aboard. 

It was an appropriate gesture. At the time, NSA was secretly building its own eavesdropping navy to supplement its Sigint air force. As the air battles of the 1950s claimed more and more lives, ferret ships began joining ferret planes. Ships could also cover the southern hemisphere— South America and sub-Saharan Africa—where NSA had almost no listening posts. Both areas were of growing concern as the United States and Russia sought to expand their influence throughout the developing world. 

The concept was not new. For years the Soviets had used a fleet of about forty antenna-sprouting trawlers. They would bob just outside the three-mile territorial limit and eavesdrop on defense installations along the east and west coasts of the U.S. "The Soviets had a vast intelligence program which included the use of Soviet trawlers," said former KGB major general Oleg Kalugin, "and specially equipped scientific ships, so called, which operated under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. They would go to various places—the Atlantic, the Pacific and wherever they could. And they would use the intelligence equipment ... to intercept electronic communications and then ... break them." 

President Eisenhower authorized NSA's first signals intelligence ship on November 12, 1959. The Samuel R. Aitken would become the USS Oxford. Although previously only cruisers had been named for cities, it was decided to make an exception for eavesdropping vessels. "Oxford" was chosen because it was found to be the commonest city name in the United States. The vessel was also given the euphemistic designation "Auxiliary General Technical Research" (AGTR) ship. 

The conversion work began in October 1960, just before the presidential elections. At 441 feet long, with a beam of 57 feet and a displacement of 11,498 tons, the Oxford was large enough to house a sizable listening post. On September 11, 1961, Lieutenant Commander 81 Howard R. Lund reported his ship ready for duty, ostensibly for the Navy's Atlantic Service Force, and proceeded from New York to the vessel's home port of Norfolk, Virginia. 

The Oxford would be unlike any other ship ever sent to sea. To quickly get intercepts from the ship to NSA, a unique sixteen-foot dish-shaped antenna was installed on its fantail. On December 15, the Oxford became the first ship at sea ever to receive a message bounced off the moon. "Signaling another first in communications by the Navy," said the message from the Chief of Naval Operations, "this message being sent to you from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Field Station, Stump Neck, Maryland, via the moon." 

A few weeks later, the Oxford left Norfolk on its first operational cruise, an eavesdropping sweep off eastern South America. After a brief visit to Colon, Panama, it crossed the equator and sailed to Recife, Brazil; Montevideo, Uruguay; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Along the way, the ship successfully used its moon-bounce antenna to send information back to Washington—another first. 

In addition to speed, the moon-bounce antenna also provided the ship with stealth. Unlike the standard high-frequency communications, which were vulnerable to foreign direction-finding antennas, the moon-bounce signal was virtually undetectable because it used hard-to-intercept directional microwave signals. The moon-bounce system was also immune to jamming. Ground stations for the system were located at Cheltenham, Maryland, near NSA; Wahiawa, Hawaii; Sobe, Okinawa; and Oakhanger, in the United Kingdom. 

On June 20, 1962, Commander Thomas Avery Cosgrove took over as captain of the Oxford. Cosgrove was a "mustang," an officer who had previously served as an enlisted man; he was "as rough as sandpaper," said Aubrey Brown, one of the intercept operators on the ship. "He had tattoos all the way on his arms down to his wrists. He had a tattoo around his neck. And he had the language of a boatswain's mate." 

About a month later, on July 16, the ship set out for another four month surveillance mission down the South American coast. But three days later it received an emergency message to set sail immediately for Cuba "in response to highest priority intelligence requirements." 

By the summer of 1962, the shipping lanes between Russia and Cuba were beginning to resemble a freeway during rush hour. On July 24, NSA reported "at least four, and possibly five . . . Soviet passenger ships en route Cuba with a possible 3,335 passengers on board." The passengers may well have been Soviet military personnel brought to operate Soviet radar and weapons systems. Over little more than a month, fifty-seven Soviet merchant ships visited Havana. "In addition to the shipping 82 increase," recalled Admiral Robert Lee Dennison, who was in charge of the Atlantic fleet at the time, "there were large numbers of Soviet-bloc military personnel prior to August and then there was a buildup during August and September when nine passenger ships arrived in Cuba with a total capacity of 20,000 passengers. But at the time we didn't have any way of really confirming how many people were on board these ships because they would disembark at night." 

At the same time, NSA began noticing increased use of deception. Ships leaving ports in Russia listed destinations in the Far East and in Africa. But NSA, with its network of giant elephant cages intercepting the vessels' daily broadcasts and triangulating their positions, was able to track them as they crossed the Atlantic en route to Cuba. NSA was also able to detect ships loading far less cargo than their manifests called for, thus leaving a great deal of room for weapons and military supplies. Thus when the new Soviet cargo ship Beloretsk arrived at Archangel in late May it was supposed to load about 7,800 tons of lumber, but only 5,240 tons were actually put aboard. That cargo filled only a third of the Norwegian-built ship's 14,150-ton capacity. "It is therefore believed," concluded an NSA report, "that the Beloretsk may be carrying a partial load of military cargo." 

As the summer wore on, the signals became more ominous. About forty miles off the westernmost tip of Cuba, an antenna-packed ferret plane picked up the first telltale sounds of Soviet airborne intercept radar. This meant that Cuban air defense bases could now accurately target and shoot down U.S. aircraft flying over or near their territory, thus increasing exponentially the risks of the eavesdropping missions. That same day, intercept operators began hearing Russian voices over Cuban internal communications links. "Comint sources reveal Russian and non-Cuban voice activity on Cuban Revolutionary Air Force tactical frequencies," said one report. Another troubling sign. 

In May 1962, as the Soviet buildup in Cuba continued to look more menacing, Vice Admiral Frost began touring listening posts in the Far East, including the large Navy monitoring station at Kamiseya, Japan. The next month he was suddenly booted from the agency and transferred to the Potomac River Naval Command, a halfway house for admirals on the brink of retirement. Director for less than two years, Frost bore the brunt of the various inquests into the double defection of Martin and Mitchell. Because of that, and disputes with the Pentagon, his cryptologic career was terminated prematurely. Many also felt Frost had a problem dealing with NSA personnel. "I thought Frost was one of the least effective NSA heads," said former NSA research chief Howard Campaigne. "I think his problems were communication problems." Another former NSA official said Frost had trouble controlling his anger. "I saw him chew out Frank Raven, Bill Ray [senior NSA officials], and some Air Force brigadier general in a briefing," said Robert D. Farley, a former NSA historian. "Just the finger-on-the-chest bit."

Replacing Frost was fifty-one-year-old Gordon Aylesworth Blake, an Air Force lieutenant general. Blake knew what he was getting into; he had earlier run NSA's air arm, the Air Force Security Service. As a sixteen-year-old, he slipped into West Point under the age limit. "I hadn't been north of Minneapolis, east of Chicago, south of Des Moines, or west of Sioux City," he recalled. "I was pretty green." 

Eventually awarded his pilot's wings, Blake went on to communications school and was assigned to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1939. On the morning of December 7, 1941, he was on duty as the airfield operations officer, waiting to make sure a returning flight of B-17 bombers was properly parked. They were due to arrive at 8:00 A.M. from California. "So all of a sudden we hear this big 'karroppp,''" said Blake. "I raced outside and here was a dive-bomber that had bombed a big depot hangar at the south end of the hangar line. It pulled up and we could see this red circle under the wing. Well, no guessing as to what the hell had happened." Blake ran up to the control tower to warn the B-17s that were due in and he eventually managed to land them safely. For his actions during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry. 

Blake knew Frost was in trouble and was somewhat uneasy at moving in as his predecessor was moving out. "Jack Frost was under some nebulous status because of the Martin-Mitchell case," he said. "I very much felt badly about coming in over his prostrate form, and he understood that." 

Blake kept Dr. Louis Tordella as deputy director and largely left to him the agency's most secret operations. "It would be better for NSA and for those activities if I left that to Tordella," Blake said. "And that was our working relationship. So while I usually had a general knowledge of this compartment and that compartment, I made no attempt to be really knowledgeable about it and, therefore, just less involved security-wise. Maybe that's an odd view but directors come and go and for them to become a repository of every last little secret never struck me as being really very useful." Tordella was on his way to an extraordinary reign as NSA's chief keeper of the secrets. 

Sensing the tremors of approaching war in the summer of 1941, Tordella, then a thirty-year-old assistant professor of mathematics at Loyola University in Chicago, one day walked into the nearby U.S. Fifth Army Headquarters and volunteered his services. But after the professor explained that he held a doctorate in mathematics, practiced cryptanalysis as a hobby, held an amateur radio license, and wanted to serve, the Army major in charge could not be bothered. Possibly thinking that the new recruit would be far more comfortable with a box of chalk instead of bullets, he brushed him off with a sneer: "When we want you, we'll draft you."

Cold-shouldered by the Army, Tordella would soon be embraced by the Navy. Spotting his background on a questionnaire Tordella had filled out for the American Academy of Science, Laurance Safford, a naval officer and father of the Navy's codebreaking effort, rolled out the red carpet. By April 1942, Tordella was a lieutenant (junior grade) assigned to OP-20-G, the Navy's cryptologic organization, in Washington. Working out of a temporary building on Constitution Avenue, the lanky Hoosier stood his first watch—supervising direction-finding operations—after one eight-hour indoctrination. 

But before long, Tordella was using mathematics like a burglar using lock picks, looking for the array of numbers that would pry open the hellish German cipher machine known as Enigma. In July 1942, Lieutenant Tordella was transferred to Bainbridge Island in the state of Washington, a key intercept station for eavesdropping on Japanese communications. But after several years at the remote listening post in the Northwest, and with the war beginning to wind down, Tordella ached to test his skills closer to the front. The opportunity came in 1944, when he received orders to China. 

During a stopover in Washington, D.C., for meetings, however, he learned that he had been bumped from the assignment. Instead of heading to the war, he boarded a train to New York City and a special twelve-week course at Bell Laboratories on new equipment that was designed to decipher Japanese voice codes. Initially, Tordella was to travel to the South Pacific to test various equipment and techniques. However, before the system could be deployed the military situation in the Pacific changed. Tordella was again reassigned, this time as the officer-in-charge of a newly established Navy experimental intercept site at Skaggs Island, an isolated, mosquito-infested wetland near San Francisco. Here, amid the frogs and snakes and antennas, Tordella sat out the remainder of the war. 

Mustered out in October 1946, Tordella had not lost his taste for codebreaking. Rather than return to the classroom in Chicago, he signed on as a civilian mathematician with the Navy's cryptologic organization, then called the Communications Supplementary Activity and later the Naval Security Group. With the formation of NSA in 1952, Tordella transferred over and became chief of NSA-70, which was responsible for high-level cryptanalysis. A rising star, he was named deputy director in August 1958. 

Because Tordella had developed a close working relationship with the CIA's chief of operations, Richard Helms, who would later go on to become director, Blake also let the mathematician handle the problems that occasionally developed with that agency. One difficult situation came up when the CIA tried to muscle in on the NSA's territory by putting out its own signals intelligence reports. "I left that one to Lou for some reason or another to sort it out," said Blake. "He and Dick Helms were thick as thieves." 

With the enormous focus on Cuba, Blake barely had enough time to find his office before the alarm bells began to sound. On July 19, Robert McNamara pushed NSA into high gear. "NSA has been directed by Sec Def [Secretary of Defense] to establish a Sigint collection capability in the vicinity of Havana, Cuba," Blake immediately notified the Chief of Naval Operations, "as a matter of the highest intelligence priority." He then pulled the ferret ship USS Oxford from its South American patrol and sent it steaming toward Havana. 

The Oxford was ideally suited for the mission. Where once cases of lima beans, truck axles, plumbing pipes, and other cargo had been stored, the earphone-clad intercept operators now sat in front of racks of receivers and reel-to-reel tape recorders. Up forward, near the bow, voice and Morse collection specialists twisted dials and searched for signals. Fortunately for NSA, the Cubans never tried to scramble voice communications. In the background was the constant rapping of teleprinters printing out intercepted Soviet and Cuban telexes and other communications. One deck above was a steel forest of antennas. In the stern, below another forest of spindly metal tree trunks and stiff wire branches, the Elint specialists listened for the twitters and warbles of Russian radar on Cuban air bases. 

"From the ship we could look up and down the length of the island," said Harold L. Parish, a Soviet analyst. As if it were on a cruise to nowhere, the Oxford would sail in circles and figure eights for weeks at a time six miles off Havana's Morro Castle. The ship's slow and lazy pace was especially good for loitering near key microwave beams, narrow signals that were difficult for airborne ferrets to pick up. "The quality of the intercept was good," Parish said. "Even with the C-130 you were flying kind of fast and you flew through the microwave beams" so that not enough signal was captured to decipher. 

As the weeks went by, the intercepts became increasingly ominous. On August 17, an Elint operator on the Oxford heard an unusual sound, like the song of a rare bird out of its normal habitat. It was the electronic call of a Soviet radar codenamed Whiff, a troubling sound that meant Russian anti-aircraft weapons had now been set up. 

At NSA, a number of Soviet Sigint experts in A Group were suddenly told to report to the office of Major General John Davis, the operations chief. "We were called down and told there was evidence of offensive missiles," said Hal Parish. They were then sent to help out the Spanish Sigint experts on the Cuba desk in B Group. "We all descended down there and we formed what was the watch for the Cuban missile crisis. . . . All the people who were previously associated with the Cuban target— the management and so forth—kind of disappeared and went off to the side. We came down and set up the round-the-clock activities and sort of went from there." Parish said some friction developed between NSA's civilian and military staffs. "There was some," he said, "there always is." 

In Washington, within hours of receiving the CRITIC message containing the intelligence, senior officials began scurrying to meetings. The CIA director, John McCone, told one high-level group that he believed that the evidence pointed to the construction of offensive ballistic missiles in Cuba—missiles that could hit as far north as the southern part of the United States. What else could the anti-aircraft weapons be protecting? he asked. But both Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McNamara disagreed, maintaining that the buildup was purely defensive. 

To try to coordinate much of the data collection, Blake set up NSA's first around-the-clock Sigint Command Center, which later became the present-day National Security Operations Center (NSOC). "It was for most of us our initial contact by telephone with a customer on the other end," said one of those assigned to the command center. "It was the first time I had ever talked to colonels from DIA [the Defense Intelligence Agency]. Same with CIA. . . . We turned on the heavy reporting, both spot and daily report summaries at that time and twice-daily summaries.....We worked between eight and twenty hours a day." 

Blake spent much of his time in meetings with the U.S. Intelligence Board. "We would recess for a few hours so the staff could type something," he said, "and then we would come back again, and the basic question we were addressing [was], If we belly up to the Russians, what will they do? Well, I am sure you realize how hard that question is because you talk about intent, you see, and you don't read any messages that give you intent. And I recall our final paper on the subject to the president, pretty much bottom line was 'We think the Russians will blink.' " 

Among the key problems NSA faced was a shortage of Spanish linguists and, at least in the early stages of the crisis, a lack of intercept coverage. "One collection facility . . . against x-hundred emitters that were on the air at the time from the Cuban area," said NSA cryptologist Hal Parish, "we were just a little short. So that was a problem." Still another concern was the lack of secure communications between NSA and the listening posts. "Communications were definitely a problem," Parish said. "Secure communications. I'd say we were doing advisory support over the open telephone line." The Oxford's unique moon-bounce dish was critical in relaying both messages and intercepts from Havana's doorstep to the analysts in the command center. But according to Parish, "It was only a twelve-hour-a-day system, unfortunately, because the moon was out of sight at times." 

With the Oxford now in place, the amount of Sigint concerning Cuba went from a trickle to a gush. The intercepts clearly showed that the Russians were exercising greater and greater control over Cuban military activities. "Concentrated efforts have been made by Bloc pilots and controllers to converse entirely in Spanish," said one report, "but, on occasion, they have reverted to their native tongue to convey a difficult command or request to other Bloc pilots or controllers." Other intercepts revealed nighttime jet gunnery exercises, bombing practice, and extensive patrols. NSA issued a dramatic report showing just how massive the sudden buildup was. In the last three months of 1961, total gross tonnage of ships heading for Cuba was 183,923. But in just the past two months—July and August of 1962—the gross tonnage had jumped to 518,196. 

Worried about leaks, Kennedy had ordered a tight lid clamped on the secret intelligence operations against Cuba. "The President said to put it back in the box and nail it tight," said Lieutenant General Marshall S. (Pat) Carter, deputy director of the CIA at the time. At NSA, Blake ordered a new codeword, further limiting the number of people with access to the information, and extra restrictions on intercepts revealing offensive weapons. "Sigint evidence of Cuban acquisition of potentially offensive weapons systems," said the message, "(e.g., surface-to-surface missiles, bombers, submarines) will . . . contain preamble 'This is a FUNNEL message' and be forwarded electronically to DIRNSA [Director, NSA] only at 01 precedence or higher. . . . No, repeat, no further dissemination is authorized without specific instructions." 

For the airborne eavesdroppers, the skies around Cuba had suddenly become extremely dangerous. Three times a day an RB-47 Strato-Spy would take off from Macdill Air Force Base, outside Tampa. Loaded with eavesdropping gear, it would fly along the Cuban coast, sucking signals from the air. The tapes would quickly be flown to NSA, where analysts would search for new signals coming from the vicinity of the surface-to air missile sites under construction. Other C-130 "flying listening posts" also flew along the coast, just outside Cuban territory. All the ferrets were equipped with special automatic scanning devices to instantly pick up SA-2 anti-aircraft—related signals. 

At the White House, President Kennedy discussed the possibility of moving the ferrets farther from the Cuban coast, but NSA argued against it, even though one of the missions—the daily routes—was within range of Cuban missiles. The problem was, the farther it moved from the coast,the fewer signals it could pick up. "This [equipment] is now operating at the margin of its capability," said NSA. "If it is moved further out, the mission, an electronic intelligence one, might as well be abandoned." While arguing to keep the planes in harm's way, Blake also made protection of the aircraft the most important responsibility of the listening posts. "I feel that our first priority requirement is reporting reaction in connection with high and low level reconnaissance flights," he notified the commander of NSA's air contingent. 

The foresight of developing an NSA navy was paying off. Sitting just half a dozen miles from downtown Havana, the Oxford was able to eavesdrop on a wealth of communications. As a result, Blake requested appropriations for an additional "shipborne collection platform" for use against Cuba, this one a large civilian-manned vessel operated by the Military Sea Transportation Service. "NSA is therefore commencing negotiations," said his message to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "for the procurement of the USNS Muller, a vessel which can approximate the accommodations and facilities aboard the Oxford." But first Blake needed the money. 

If Blake trusted Tordella with all of the agency's secrets, he trusted Congress and their oversight and appropriations responsibilities with none of them. Asked how difficult it was to testify fully about NSA's activities before congressional committees, Blake had a simple answer. "It was very difficult and, therefore, we didn't do it." Instead, said Blake, "my technique for that dealt with two gentlemen who were very cooperative" when it came to probing NSA—that is, there were no questions asked. "Being able to talk more frankly to them," he added, "and let them see to it that the rest of the Committee didn't get too far afield was obviously a tremendous boon to the director and his budget activities." According to Blake, those two were Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, on the House Appropriations Committee, and Senator Richard Russell, who occupied a similar position on the Senate side. "I would have private meetings with those two only," said Blake. "That was my technique, and it worked beautifully. . . . My recollection is a pretty successful three years in terms of resources." 

To make up for the lack of additional people, Blake began yanking intercept operators from other listening posts around the world and sending them to southern Florida. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Army Sigint personnel attached to the 326th ASA Company were told to drop everything and board planes for Homestead Air Base near Miami, a key listening post during the crisis. Eavesdropping aircraft were moved from their location in Rota, Spain, to air bases in Jacksonville and Pensacola. From there they would fly down to Key West, pick up intercept operators, and conduct eight- to ten-hour missions off the Cuban coast. 

In a matter of days the Navy turned Key West from a sleepy supply depot for cryptologic equipment to a buzzing city of eavesdroppers. "What had been sort of a lazy tempo in the Key West theater of operations suddenly heated up to match the summer weather," recalled Owen Englander, who was in charge of the Key West naval security detachment. "Almost overnight the National Command Authority and the Navy and Air Force operational worlds discovered Naval Security Group Detachment Key West. A decision was made to beef us up and people commenced to arrive from every direction." 

The intercept operators worked in a World War I bunker buried under fifteen feet of reinforced concrete and compacted marl—sand, clay, and crushed coral. It was designed to withstand a direct hit from a 16-inch shell. Sailors immediately began setting up a huge dish antenna as well as an assortment of wires and poles. In addition to the planes, bases, and ships eavesdropping on Cuban and Soviet communications, submarines were sent in. One sub was able to sneak close enough to eavesdrop on a microwave link on the Isle of Pines. For NSA's eavesdroppers, submarines provided a quality no other platform could offer: stealth. 

But although it was NSA's most important target in the summer and fall of 1962, Cuba was far from the only one. 

At periscope depth, sixty feet under the dark and frigid Barents Sea, the USS Nautilus (SSN 571) was barely moving. The world's first nuclear powered submarine, it had made headlines four years earlier when it sailed beneath the ice pack to the North Pole and broadcast the message "Nautilus 90 north." Now it was on an enormously sensitive espionage mission a short distance off a black and desolate Soviet island above the Arctic Circle. Without doubt, Novaya Zemlya was the most forbidding piece of real estate on the planet. One year earlier, the Russians had exploded the largest bomb in the history of mankind above the island, a 58-megaton thermonuclear monster. Now the crew of the Nautilus was busy making preparations to eavesdrop on and photograph a new round of tests. Thirteen miles from ground zero, Sigint specialist John Arnold was attaching the final piece of critical equipment—a cardboard toilet paper tube. 

Arnold, a Navy chief, was a fast riser in a super exclusive club: NSA's small band of undersea intercept operators. Sealed for months in closet sized listening posts aboard specially outfitted submarines, the deep diving eavesdroppers prowled close to Soviet coasts, recording shorebased transmitters and key signals within the Russian fleet. "Collection at thirteen miles was pretty good," said Arnold. "Sometimes you could even pick up signals with your antennas underwater. Not much, but some of the radars were strong enough to penetrate the water." Locating radar installations was a key mission of the team. "You could tell from the frequency and the pulse repetition rate and the scan rate what kind of radar it is and take its bearing by direction finding." 

Arnold began his career in the old diesel-powered boats, which needed to break the surface about once every twenty-four hours in order to get new air through the snorkel. "If you had any antennas or masts up, the periscope was always up—even during the daytime—because a helicopter or aircraft could come cruising by and they would see your mast," said Arnold. "And if you didn't have your periscope up keeping a lookout, they could end up detecting you." 

Once, a conning officer became so mesmerized watching a helicopter he completely forgot to call an alert. "He just kept focused on it and watched it come right over us," said Arnold. "So we became the target of an ASW [antisubmarine warfare] exercise in short order. That kept us down for over two days before we could shake him and get fresh air again. Everyone that was nonessential was to stay in their bunks to minimize the consumption of oxygen." 

Arnold had spent much of the summer of 1962 beneath the waves of the Barents Sea. A few months earlier, in anticipation of renewed nuclear tests, he had put together a special piece of equipment and headed for Novaya Zemlya aboard the USS Scorpion. But when the tests were postponed, the crew spent the mission conducting electronic surveillance just off Russia's sensitive Kola Peninsula. "We almost had an underwater collision with a [Soviet] November-class submarine," said Arnold. "We were trailing, collecting data on its bottom side when it was on the surface. We were smack dab under him. . . . Between the bottom of his sub and the top of the Scorpion, sometimes the periscope was only six to twelve inches, closely inspecting underwater appendages, protrusions, and so forth, and recording it on television." Suddenly the depth finder aboard the Soviet boat sent out a "ping" to determine the distance to the bottom. "That was standard practice just before they dive," said Arnold. The Scorpion escaped just in time. 

Back home for just a few days, Arnold was again quickly dispatched to Novaya Zemlya when word was received that Soviet bomb testing would begin soon. This time he was transferred to the nuclear-powered Nautilus. As other Sigint specialists eavesdropped on Soviet technicians rigging for the test, Arnold was fitting the sub's periscopes with special photographic equipment. The cameras were connected to the lens of the scopes with rolls of cardboard toilet paper tubes double-wrapped with black electric tape. "On one periscope we had an optical detector that measured light intensity versus time," said Arnold. "On the other we had a high-speed color movie camera attached." 

Suddenly the dimly lit submarine, deep under the surface of the sea,lit up with a blinding light. "When the detonation went off it was just like someone had set off a flashbulb in your face," said Arnold. The light had blasted through the heavily wrapped toilet paper tubes as if they were made of see-through plastic. The crew not only saw the flash, they heard and felt the explosion. "It was a really weird sound when you're in a submarine," Arnold recalled. "It sounds like a jet airplane when it breaks the sound barrier. Then you feel it also. It feels as though you're standing on a steel deck and somebody under the deck has a sledgehammer and he hits the steel deck plate right where you're standing—it's a sharp shock. It broke a few fluorescent light bulbs and caused some insulation to pop off." 

Over six weeks, Arnold witnessed twelve or thirteen tests. "They were from twenty kilotons up to fifty megatons," Arnold said. After the initial blast, the explosion could be viewed through the periscope. "They were spectacularly beautiful to watch," he said. "You could look through the periscope and watch the mushroom cloud build and the colors develop." Following the nuclear tests, Arnold, like many other intercept operators, was assigned to a mission off Cuba, this time aboard a surface ship trying to pick up signals related to the deadly Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missiles. 

About two o'clock in the morning on September 15, 1962, the crisis again ratcheted up several levels. After double-checking and triple checking, there was no question: the U.S. listeners had detected a Russian "Spoon Rest" radar, fully active. For the first time, the SA-2 missiles were operational, capable of shooting down any aircraft on a moment's notice, as had the SA-2 in Russia that brought down the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers. Listening posts in Florida, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere helped the Oxford pinpoint the signal as emanating from a location about three miles west of the port of Mariel. From now on, all U.S. pilots, no matter what aircraft they flew, would have a cocked gun pointed at them. 

The activation of the SA-2 missiles gave NSA and CIA an opportunity to fake the Russians into revealing key details of the weapons system. Gene Poteat, a young CIA scientist, had come up with a scheme to inject false targets into Soviet radar. Codenamed Palladium, the operation involved sending deceptive signals to give Russian radar operators the false impression that they were tracking an aircraft. "By smoothly varying the length of the delay," Poteat wrote later, "we could simulate the false target's range and speed." As the Russians tracked the ghost aircraft, NSA intercept operators listened in. Later analysis would be able to determine such important details as just how sensitive the radar systems were, and to assess the proficiency of the operators.

The Palladium system was mounted on a destroyer operating out of Key West. As the ship cruised well off the Cuban coast, the Palladium system transmitted false signals indicating that a U.S. fighter plane out of Florida was about to penetrate Cuban airspace. At about the same time, an American submarine that had slipped into Havana Bay released a number of balloons that carried metal spheres of varying size into the sky.

Elsewhere on the destroyer, in an NSA van lashed to the deck, intercept operators closely monitored the Russian radar, hoping to be able to determine just how accurate the system was by studying the way it tracked the ghost aircraft and the metal objects. They quickly struck pay dirt. A Cuban fighter suddenly took off after the ghost aircraft; other MiGs began circling where the submarine had surfaced. In the NSA van, the intercept operators quickly began eavesdropping on both the shorebased radar systems and the pilots pursuing the ghost aircraft. "We had no trouble in manipulating the Palladium system controls," wrote Poteat, "to keep our ghost aircraft always just ahead of the pursuing Cuban planes." Through earphones, one intercept operator heard the Cuban pilot notify his base that he had the intruding plane in sight and was about to shoot it down. A technician moved his finger to a button. "I nodded yes," said Poteat, "and he switched off the Palladium system." The ghost aircraft disappeared. 

Palladium proved very successful, revealing that the Soviet radar systems were state-of-the-art and that their operators were equally skilled. "We also knew which of their radars had low power or maintenance problems or were otherwise not functioning up to par," noted Poteat, "and where the U.S. Air Force might safely penetrate in wartime." 

Five days before the discovery of the operational SA-2 missiles, Secretary of State Rusk had become so worried over the prospects of a shootdown over or near Cuba that he asked for a meeting of the key players in Operation Mongoose. Rusk was particularly unsettled by several recent incidents. On August 50, a U-2 had accidentally overflown Russia's Sakhalin Island, generating a harsh Soviet protest, and a few days later another CIA U-2, based in Taiwan and flown by a Chinese Nationalist, was lost over mainland China. 

At the meeting, Rusk mentioned the incidents and then looked across the table at CIA deputy director Pat Carter. "Pat, don't you ever let me up?" he asked jokingly. "How do you expect me to negotiate on Berlin with all these incidents?" But Robert Kennedy saw no humor. "What's the matter, Dean, no guts?" he snapped. Eventually Rusk and Carter compromised on a reduced flight schedule. But Carter expressed his concern. "I want to put you people on notice," he said, "that it remains our intention to fly right up over those SAMs to see what is there." There was no response, positive or negative. As the meeting broke up and the officials began heading for the doors, Carter quietly grumbled, "There they all go again and no decisions." 

The next day, October 10, NSA reported that the Cuban air defense system seemed to be complete. The Cubans had just begun passing radar tracking from radar stations to higher headquarters and to defensive fighter bases using Soviet procedures. Their system, with Russians in advisory positions at every point, was now ready for business. 

From the very first, NSA had performed superbly in tracking the Cuban arms buildup, shipload by shipload, pallet by pallet. But without the ability to break high-level Soviet or Cuban cipher systems, the codebreakers could not answer the most important question: Were all the weapons being delivered defensive, or were any offensive, such as ballistic missiles? Even unencrypted Cuban communications frequently frustrated NSA's abilities. "Communications security has been very well maintained through a system of cover words and/or callsigns," one NSA report noted. Instead, NSA depended mostly on commercial ship transmissions, unencrypted Cuban chatter, and direction finding. Thus it was neither the NSA nor the CIA that would discover the first hard evidence of medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) in Cuba. Instead it was the high-resolution "eyes" of an Air Force U-2. Nevertheless, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who would later become Chief of Naval Operations, told Congress that "electronic intelligence led to the photographic intelligence that gave indisputable evidence of the Soviet missiles in Cuba."

On Thursday, October 18, a U-2's high-altitude reconnaissance photography revealed that the Soviet and Cuban construction teams were making rapid progress. In August, only the initial construction of one missile site was observed. But new photography revealed two confirmed MRBM sites and one probable. Two other sites, possibly for the more powerful intermediate-range missiles, were also confirmed. 

On the Oxford, it was nail-biting time. NSA intercepts picked up frequent Cuban references to "the Oxford spy ship." According to Parish, "They would send vessels out and get in their path. Some low flyers would come over—low-flying aircraft. They would come on, circle them with their guns trained on them." 

"We were all listening for Russian communications, Cuban and Russian," said Oxford intercept operator Aubrey Brown. "The Cubans didn't take too kindly to the idea of us sitting out there and doing this. So there was a game of harassment that they played—they would send these gunboats out and you could see the crew going to general quarters, you could see the guns being trained on the ship. They take an attack position and then run a fake attack on the ship. The people on the boats were standing behind the guns."

"Jesus Christ," yelled one senior intercept operator. "It's war! Havana harbor just went crypto." Until then, the routine broadcasts to ships entering Havana harbor had been in the clear. Suddenly the broadcast became gibberish. After a short while and further analysis, however, it was determined that the nervous intercept operator had put the intercept tape in his machine backwards. As tensions increased, McCone brought up with President Kennedy the issue of the Oxford's safety. The CIA director was eventually given permission to move it farther away, to about twenty miles. 

Back in the Elint section of the ship, the technicians would hear screeching as the Cuban fire-control radar locked on them; then, MiGs would be launched. At the same time, the U.S. listeners were eavesdropping on what the boats and the MiGs were saying. 

The arrival of NSA civilians on the ship was wrapped in mystery. "You kind of know things are getting a little more agitated because over in Key West you would pick up a couple of guys from NSA who will come out and do three weeks of special duty," said Brown. "And they've got some kind of assignment that no one will talk about. They come in with special recorders and they put them in the racks and they do their stuff and they leave."

Because NSA was unable to break the Soviet cipher system, one of the special missions involved sending someone to the Oxford with special equipment to try to capture the radiation emitted from Soviet crypto machines. These signals—known in NSA as Tempest emissions— contained deciphered information and thus would be extremely valuable. But to collect those signals, the ship had to get very close to the Russian station. "We took the ship in pretty close. We usually stayed out eight miles, but this time we went in to around four miles," said Brown. "There was a Russian communications station there that was in communication with Moscow, and they were trying to pick up the Tempest radiation from this crypto device. If they could get the Tempest radiation, they [the NSA] had the key to the universe then." 

The intercept operators were also looking for sharp "noise spikes," which could offer clues as to rotor settings on older crypto machines. "The codebreakers were having a tough time with this code," said Max Buscher, a Sigint operator on the Oxford during the crisis. "They thought that if we got in close, if the encrypting device was electromechanical, we might pick up some noise spikes; that would be a clue as to how the machine was stepping with its rotors. We monitored that twenty-four hours a day." 

At NSA headquarters, the Cuba Watch team was trying to piece together the military order of battle in Cuba. "We had constructed a Cuban air defense system," said Parish. "We really had not identified the SAM communications and so on." Along the rim of the Atlantic Ocean, NSA's listening posts and elephant cages were put on special alert. As Navy ships began leaving port to get into position to enforce a blockade, it was critical to know the location, speed, and cargo of Soviet ships now crossing the Atlantic en route to Cuba. 

Even more important was any indication of Soviet submarines. In the blockhouses at the center of the massive antennas, intercept operators scanned the frequency spectrum hoping for a hit. Once a signal was captured, listening posts on both sides of the Atlantic would immediately transmit the information to the net control center at Cheltenham, Maryland. There, technicians would triangulate the exact positions of the ships and subs and pass the information on to analysts in NSA. It was feared that once a blockade was announced, the Russians might attempt to smuggle nuclear warheads or other weapons to Cuba under the American ships patrolling the restricted area. On a wall-size plotting board in the Merchant Shipping Section, small magnetic ships would be moved as the positions were reported by Cheltenham. Photographs would then be taken of the board for inclusion in the next morning's intelligence report, which would be sent to the White House.

In late September, four Soviet submarines had slipped into the Atlantic from the Barents Sea. The F-class attack subs were the top of the line, capable of launching nuclear-tipped torpedoes. NSA had been keeping track of the movements of an oil-resupply vessel, the Terek, which was suspected of providing support to the subs; wherever the Terek went, the Soviet submarines were thought to be close by. By October the Terek and the submarines were halfway across the Atlantic, an unusual move by a navy that usually keeps its submarines close to home. American intelligence feared that the four were the vanguard for a Soviet submarine facility in Cuba. Another vessel of great interest to NSA, traveling in the general vicinity of the Terek, was the electronic eavesdropping ship Shkval, which was also suspected of supporting the subs while at the same time collecting intelligence on U.S. ships in the area. 

On Sunday, October 21, the Oxford made a grim discovery. "I was at work and all of a sudden there were people running all over the place," said intercept operator Aubrey Brown. "They're distraught, they're preoccupied, and they're trying to send out Flash messages and everything's going crazy." (Seldom used, Flash messages have the highest priority; the designation is reserved for dire war-related messages.) Most of the activity was coming from behind the cipher-locked door to the aft Elint space. Inside the darkened room, crammed with receivers, six-foot-tall 3M tape recorders, and an assortment of eerie green screens, technicians hovered around the flickering scope of the WLR-l X-band receiver. 

They had just picked up the screeching sounds from a troubling new radar system in Cuba, and they wanted to be sure it was what they suspected. Again and again they measured the width of the pulses—the size of the spikes on the scope. Holding on to stopwatches that dangled from their necks, they clicked them on and off to time the interval between the woop sounds, giving them the radar's scan rate. Once they were sure of the signal's makeup, they checked the NSA's highly classified TEXTA (Technical Extracts of Traffic Analysis) Manual and confirmed its identity. 

"One of our T Branchers [Elint operators] intercepted one of the radars going on line for the first time," said Max Buscher. "And they could tell by the parameters that it was a radar associated with an offensive missile system. This was flashed to NSA. Six hours later, a jet helicopter came down and lowered a rope and they wanted the tape— they didn't just take our word for it, the NSA wanted the tape." 

Early the next day, October 22, NSA had more bad news: at least five Soviet missile regiments would soon become operational in Cuba. Each regiment would have eight missile launchers and sixteen missiles. Thus, Cuba would have the potential to launch a first salvo of forty missiles, and a refire capability of another forty. 

Later that morning, at a National Security Council meeting, McCone discussed the Terek and other up-to-the-minute intelligence on Soviet shipping. The Poltava, he said, was due to arrive in Cuba in about five days, and its cargo was so arranged as to make it clear that long cylinders were on board.

At 1:00 P.M. the Strategic Air Command began to initiate "quietly and gradually" a partial airborne alert and the dispersal of bombers to air bases around the country. At the same time, the Navy began to quietly evacuate dependents, by ship and air, from the American base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Within nine hours, all 2,810 people had been safely removed. 

That evening at seven, President Kennedy addressed the nation, announcing that "unmistakable evidence" had established the presence of Soviet MRBM and ICBM sites and nuclear-capable bombers in Cuba. He then said that he was ordering imposed on Cuba a "strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment." Finally, he warned the Soviet government that the United States will "regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response against the Soviet Union."  

As the president spoke, U.S. military forces in much of the world were put on alert. Polaris nuclear submarines sailed to preassigned stations at sea. Twenty-two interceptor aircraft went airborne in the event of military action from Cuba. "I had the first watch when Kennedy made his speech," said Hal Parish. "I was briefed to expect the possibility of a very high level of flight activity over Cuba that evening—to expect almost anything. I was briefed on lots of airplanes. Not a thing flew that evening. We didn't launch anything." He added, "It was a very frightening and scary experience. The only time in the thirty years I worked for the government when I was scared about the world situation, and I was really scared." 

On the Oxford, in the eye of the hurricane, many of the crew were stunned. "I was thinking, Jesus Christ, we're going to blow up the world here," said acting operations officer Keith Taylor who was down in the Sigint spaces. "After the president's announcement there was shock on the ship," said intercept operator Aubrey Brown. "What the hell was going to happen. Next time they come out they will put a torpedo up our ass." 

Also worried about the Oxford was John McCone, who ordered the ship pulled back. "Right after the announcement they moved us out to twelve miles," said Brown. "We were then moved out to a twenty-five-mile track offshore." Still worried, officials instructed the Oxford to do its eavesdropping safely off Fort Lauderdale. 

But much of the mission's work could not be done from that distance. "You could run some of the operations from Fort Lauderdale but not the bulk of it," said Brown. "You could do all the Morse code stuff but the Elint you couldn't do. . . . The next day they decided to send us back to Cuba." Brown added, "You could get some microwave sitting off Havana depending on where it is coming from and where it is going." 

Within hours of Kennedy's address, intercepts began flowing into NSA. At 10:12 P.M., an NSA listening post intercepted a Flash precedence message sent from the Soviet eavesdropping trawler Shkval, near the submarine patrol, to the cargo vessel Alantika. The Shkval then sent another message to the Alantika for retransmission to Murmansk, the home port of the submarines. Although they were unable to read the encrypted message, the U.S. intercept operators noted the significance of the Flash precedence in the report they quickly transmitted to Fort Meade. "This type of precedence rarely observed," said the intercept report. "Significance unknown." The network of listening posts was able to pinpoint the Shkval a few hundred miles south of Bermuda; the Alantika was about 150 miles off the U.S. East Coast, near Philadelphia. 

In the early morning hours of October 23, other Soviet ships likewise began calling for instructions. The Soviet cargo vessel Kura, just off Havana harbor, relayed an urgent message to Moscow through another Soviet vessel, the Nikolai Burdenko, which was approaching the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Russian passenger ship Nikolaevsk, approaching the eastern end of Cuba, sent Moscow a worried message: U.S. war vessel Nr. 889 was following her on a parallel course. Throughout the Caribbean and the North Atlantic, whenever a Soviet ship sent a weather request, indicating its position, an NSA listening post picked it up and noted its location. 

At NSA, as the world awaited Moscow's response to the U.S. ultimatum, a report was issued indicating that the Soviets were taking ever greater control of the skies over Cuba. Sixty-three MiG pilots took to the air in a single day, and of that number more than half spoke Russian or spoke Spanish with a heavy Slavic accent. Around the world, NSA listening posts were ordered to install armed patrols around their facilities. Even in tiny Cape Chiniak, on Kodiak Island in Alaska, the threat was taken seriously. Communications Technician Pete Azzole was watching the messages rattle in the Communications Center when his eyes grew wide: "A Flash precedence message began revealing itself line by line," he recalled. "My eyes were fixed on the canary yellow paper, watching each character come to life." The more the message revealed, the more nervous Azzole became. It read:

1. A NUCLEAR ATTACK HAS BEEN LAUNCHED AGAINST THE EAST COAST OF THE UNITED STATES ... After a few agonizing seconds, Azzole realized that the message was a practice drill. 

At the White House, President Kennedy was deeply troubled over the possibility of nuclear retaliation against the United States if there was a strike against Cuba. A Pentagon official told him that the area covered by the 1,100-mile-range Soviet missiles involved 92 million people. Fallout shelters were available, though not equipped, for about 40 million. When Kennedy asked what emergency steps could be taken, the official was less than encouraging. Shelter signs could be put up and food could be repositioned. But McCone concluded that whatever was done would involve a great deal of publicity and public alarm. 

Throughout the day, NSA listening posts on both sides of the Atlantic focused on about a dozen Soviet ships en route to Cuba and suspected of transporting missiles or associated equipment. Inside a listening post hidden in a snake-infested swamp in the town of Northwest, Virginia; a chilly cove in Winter Harbor, Maine; an airfield near Miami, Florida; a rolling field in Edzell, Scotland; and other locations, intercept operators triangulated every signal sent from the ships. Among those was the  Urgench, which at 3:10 P.M. was about five hundred miles from Gibraltar, sailing west toward Cuba. 

But when the Urgench was next plotted, at midnight, it had reversed course and was sailing back toward the Straits of Gibraltar. Immediately, the NSA Command Center flashed word of the possible retreat to the CIA Watch Office. Harry Eisenbeiss, the watch officer, checked with the Office of Naval Intelligence, which had also received NSA's report, but ONI could not confirm the change of course and thought it might be a Soviet ploy. 

In the meantime, the network of listening posts had spotted other ships also making 180-degree turns. The Bolshevik Sukhanov, which was carrying seven large crates on its deck, suspected to contain aircraft, "has altered course and is probably en route back to port," said another intercept report. Still another followed: "HFDF [high-frequency direction finding] fix on the Soviet cargo ship Kislovodsk, en route to Cuba, indicates that the ship has altered course to the North."

At 10:38 A.M. on Wednesday, October 24, with the Urgench continuing its retreat, another message was flashed to NSA headquarters. A copy was quickly forwarded to CIA, which in turn passed the message to the White House. An aide walked into the Executive Committee meeting and passed the note to McCone, who smiled broadly and made the announcement: "Mr. President, we have a preliminary report which seems to indicate that some of the Russian ships have stopped dead in the water." Kennedy was surprised. "Stopped dead in the water? Which ships? Are they checking the accuracy of the report? Is it true?" The NSA report convinced McCone. "The report is accurate, Mr. President. Six ships previously on their way to Cuba at the edge of the quarantine line have stopped or have turned back toward the Soviet Union."

President Kennedy ordered that "no ships ... be stopped or intercepted" for at least another hour, while additional information was obtained. "If the ships have orders to turn around, we want to give them every opportunity to do so. ... Give the Russian vessels an opportunity to turn back. We must move quickly because the time [before the United States must act] is expiring." 

Although some ships were still heading toward the barricades, the good news from NSA spread fast. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy telephoned Under Secretary of State George Ball. "Have you got the word on what is happening at sea?" Bundy asked. Ball had not. "The six most interesting ships have turned back. Two others are turning. We are starting over here in a thinking session as to what might be done, which will be going on all afternoon. If you want to come, it would be helpful to have you. . . . Will you alert anyone else you wish to alert?" "I'll be over," said Ball. 

The next day, Thursday, October 25, Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., met with Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman to discuss the latest developments. "Khrushchev," said Harriman, "is sending us desperate signals to get us to help take him off the hook. He is sending messages exactly as he did to Eisenhower directly after the U-2 affair. Eisenhower ignored these messages to his cost. We must not repeat Eisenhower's mistake." Among the key signals, Harriman told Schlesinger, was "the instructions to the Soviet ships to change their course." 

Harriman continued: "In view of these signals from Khrushchev, the worst mistake we can possibly make is to get tougher and to escalate. Khrushchev is pleading with us to help him find a way out. . . . We cannot afford to lose any time. Incidents—stopping of ships, etc.—will begin the process of escalation, engage Soviet prestige and reduce the chances of a peaceful resolution. If we act shrewdly and speedily, we can bail Khrushchev out and discredit the tough guys around him—the ones who sold him the Cuban adventure on the theory that Americans were too liberal to fight." 

When the offensive missiles had been discovered, the formal approval process for U-2 missions was ended. Now the Strategic Air Command had blanket approval to fly as many missions as needed to cover Cuba completely. Although it was time consuming, the formal notification process had had the advantage of allowing NSA listening posts to support the flights. Intercept operators would scan the frequency spectrum in search of any hostile activity before and during the mission. If they picked up a warning indicator, they could send a message to NSA headquarters, which would notify SAC. But now that U-2 missions were being launched without notice, NSA had no way of knowing when a plane was over Cuba.

But by Friday, October 26, the results of low-level photography indicated that the Russians and Cubans were rapidly attempting to complete the four medium-range-missile site. "Although no additional missiles or erectors had been seen," said a Joint Chiefs report, "neither was there evidence of any intention to move or dismantle the sites. Camouflage and canvas covering of critical equipment was continuing." 

At the same time, however, NSA reported that three Soviet ships suspected of being missile carriers were now steaming east, back toward Russia, as were all except one of the Soviet dry cargo ships. Only one Russian dry cargo ship was still moving toward the quarantine line; it was expected to reach there in three days. 

At thirty-eight minutes past midnight on Saturday, October 27, an NSA listening post intercepted signals from three radar installations.  

After checking and double-checking, the intercept operators determined that the radar was "Spoon Rest," and therefore that three more SAM sites had become active. "DF line bearings indicate emitters located at Mariel," said the intercept report, which was Flashed to headquarters, "Havana east, and poss. Matanzas sites. Emitters remain active." Once again, Castro raised the stakes for the American reconnaissance pilots. 

"On the twenty-seventh," said Parish, "it was kind of a tight situation—it was a scary situation, as a matter of fact. It was a scary time, especially for those of us who had a little bit of access to information which wasn't generally available. . . . We worked that week and pulled our watches, nobody was off." 

Later that morning, Major Rudolf Anderson took off in a U-2 from McCoy Air Force Base at Orlando, Florida. The routine flight was expected to last about three and a half hours. Over Cuba, Anderson pushed his plane northward toward the town of Banes. 

At an afternoon Executive Committee meeting, Secretary of Defense McNamara made a routine report on the day's daylight reconnaissance mission. "One mission aborted for mechanical reasons, according to preliminary reports," he said. "One plane is overdue and several are said to have encountered ground fire." He then recommended a number of night missions. But President Kennedy held off on a decision until more details could be obtained on the day's reconnaissance. He then ordered that missions be flown the next day without fighter escort. "If our planes are fired on," he said, "we must be prepared for a general response or an attack on the SAM site which fired on our planes. We will decide tomorrow how we return fire after we know if they continue their attacks on our planes." 

An aide quickly walked in and handed a note to Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor. Major Anderson's U-2 had been shot down near Banes. "The wreckage of the U-2 was on the ground," Taylor was told; "the pilot had been killed." Taylor recommended an air attack on the SAM site responsible. McNamara said that we must be ready to attack Cuba by launching 500 sorties on the first day. Invasion, he said, had "become almost inevitable." 

At NSA, data were immediately called in from air, sea, and ground eavesdropping platforms in an attempt to discover the details of the shootdown. Director Blake ordered new rules, as follows: As a first priority, every listening post was to monitor in real time all reactions to U.S. reconnaissance flights. "Any time the Cubans scrambled a flight," said Hal Parish, "we were supposed to tell. . . why they scrambled and who they were after—very often they were after U.S. aircraft along the coast. . . . When we were still flying the U-2s and we got what appeared to be Cuban threats to the U-2s with MiG aircraft, we had it arranged. . . . we would call General John Morrison at NSA first to get his okay, then we would call SAC . . . and they would contact the aircraft." 

Once a warning was received, the reconnaissance flight would immediately break off from the mission and fly to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. There, NSA analysts would meet the plane and debrief the crew. "You'd debrief in the airplane off the end of the runway," said Parish. "Pick up all the tapes and bring them out to the building and put our linguists to work all night long working on those tapes in order to provide an assessment of whatever happened that day [and have it out] by six o'clock."

In order to further protect the pilots, electronic countermeasures needed to be developed that could jam or deceive the Soviet SA-2 missile. But to develop these countermeasures, NSA would first have to intercept the missile's telltale fusing signals, which activated the warhead. That, however, required forcing the Cubans to fire off one more of their missiles. To accomplish this, DC-130 aircraft began launching high altitude Ryan 147 drones over the island. The Ryans were equipped with electronics that made them appear larger than they actually were, about the size of a U-2. 

Each drone also carried onboard equipment to collect the critical fusing signals and retransmit them, in the few seconds before it was blasted from the sky, to a specially equipped type of RB-47 Strato-Spy codenamed Common Cause. One of the RB-47s was constantly in the air off the Cuban coast. "The plan was to lure the Cuban missile sites into firing at the drone," said Bruce Bailey, an Air Force signals intelligence officer, "thus providing the desired electronic intelligence to the RB-47." But the Cubans refused to fire any more missiles. "The Cubans had been assured that such a site or base would be struck immediately," said Bailey. "Obviously they believed that and refused to fire. The mission soon became more appropriately known as 'Lost Cause.' "

At 7:15 on the evening of October 30, as the crisis grew hotter, Robert Kennedy asked Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to meet with him in his office at the Justice Department in half an hour. "In the last two hours we had found that our planes flying over Cuba had been fired upon," Kennedy told the ambassador, as he noted in a top secret memo to Dean Rusk. "One of our U-2's had been shot down and the pilot killed. . . . This was an extremely serious turn of events. We would have to make certain decisions within the next twelve or possibly twenty-four hours. There was very little time left. If the Cubans were shooting at our planes, then we were going to shoot back." Dobrynin argued that the U.S. was violating Cuban airspace, but Kennedy shot back that if we had not been violating Cuban airspace then we would still have believed what he and Khrushchev had said—that there were no long-range missiles in Cuba. "This matter was far more serious than the air space over Cuba and involved people all over the world," Kennedy added. 

"I said that he had better understand the situation and he had better communicate that understanding to Mr. Khrushchev," Kennedy later noted in the long secret memorandum. "Mr. Khrushchev and he had misled us. The Soviet Union had secretly established missile bases in Cuba while at the same time proclaiming, privately and publicly, that this would never be done. I said those missile bases had to go and they had to go right away. We had to have a commitment by at least tomorrow [October 31] that those bases would be removed. This was not an ultimatum, I said, but just a statement of fact. He should understand that if they did not remove those bases then we would remove them. His country might take retaliatory action but he should understand that before this was over, while there might be dead Americans there would also be dead Russians."  

Dobrynin asked Kennedy whether he was proposing a deal. "I said a letter had just been transmitted to the Soviet Embassy which stated in substance that the missile bases should be dismantled," Kennedy wrote, "and all offensive weapons should be removed from Cuba. In return, if Cuba and Castro and the Communists ended their subversive activities in other Central and Latin American countries, we would agree to keep peace in the Caribbean and not permit an invasion from American soil.” 

But Khrushchev had earlier proposed a swap: take the American missiles away from his doorstep in Turkey, and he would take the Soviet missiles from Cuba. Dobrynin once again brought up that proposal. "If some time elapsed," Kennedy said, mentioning four or five months, "I was sure that these matters could be resolved satisfactorily." 

But Kennedy emphasized that there could be no deal of any kind. "Any steps toward easing tensions in other parts of the world largely depended on the Soviet Union and Mr. Khrushchev taking action in Cuba and taking it immediately." According to his memorandum, "I repeated to him that this matter could not wait and that he had better contact Mr. Khrushchev and have a commitment from him by the next day to withdraw the missile bases under United Nations supervision for otherwise, I said, there would be drastic consequences." 

Shortly after Kennedy left, Dobrynin sent an enciphered cable to Khrushchev. " 'Because of the plane that was shot down, there is now strong pressure on the president to give an order to respond with fire if fired upon,' " he wrote, quoting Kennedy. " 'A real war will begin, in which millions of Americans and Russians will die.' ... Kennedy mentioned as if in passing that there are many unreasonable heads among the generals, and not only among the generals, who are 'itching for a fight.'... The situation might get out of control, with irreversible consequences." 

Then the ambassador relayed Kennedy's proposal. "The most important thing for us, Kennedy stressed, is to get as soon as possible the agreement of the Soviet government to halt further work on the construction of the missile bases in Cuba and take measures under international control that would make it impossible to use these weapons. In exchange the government of the USA is ready, in addition to repealing all measures on the 'quarantine,' to give the assurances that there will not be any invasion of Cuba. . . . 'And what about Turkey,' I asked R. Kennedy. 'If that is the only obstacle . . . then the president doesn't see any insurmountable difficulties in resolving this issue. . . . However, the president can't say anything public in this regard about Turkey,' R. Kennedy said again. R. Kennedy then warned that his comments about Turkey are extremely confidential; besides him and his brother, only 2—3 People know about it in Washington. . . . R. Kennedy gave me a number of a direct telephone line to the White House." Once again Dobrynin quoted Robert Kennedy. " 'Time is of the essence and we shouldn't miss the chance.' " 

Robert Kennedy returned to the White House, where the members of the Executive Committee held a late-night session. McNamara recommended, and the president approved, the call-up of twenty-four air reserve squadrons, involving 14,200 personnel and 300 troop carriers. President Kennedy then said that if the reconnaissance planes were fired on the next day, "then we should take out the SAM sites in Cuba by air action." 

At a late-night meeting at the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that "unless irrefutable evidence of the dismantling of the offensive weapons in Cuba were obtained," an air strike should be launched no later than October 29. 

Shortly before midnight, Hal Parish entered NSA for his midnight— to—eight A.M. shift. "When I reported in," he said, "there was a note there to have by six o'clock the following morning in the hands of the White House the wrap-up of the U-2 shootdown. Wasn't hard to do—we had about two minutes, three minutes of tracking on it ... just some tracking coming in from just north of Guantanamo . . . seemed to be a SAM that brought him down. . . . There was nothing that I ever saw in communication indicating who (whether a Soviet or a Cuban) pushed the button. . . . About two years later, from some intercept that was picked up on one of the aircraft carriers, we got the entire tracking sequence of the shootdown. We got the whole mission tracking from the time he hit Cuba all the way down until he made his turn over Guantanamo and then the tracking sort of ceased...." 

On Sunday morning, October 28, a new message from Khrushchev was broadcast on Radio Moscow. "The Soviet government," said the announcement, "has issued a new order on the dismantling of the weapons which you describe as 'offensive,' and their crating and return to the Soviet Union." The crisis was over.

As the Russians began withdrawing, NSA continued its intensive watch. "I remember during the period from the time I went down in October," Hal Parish recalled, "there was not a day I did not come to work until Christmas. Then I just took part of Christmas Day off." For the eavesdroppers, things changed dramatically. Suddenly the need for the Russians to hide their presence on Cuba disappeared, so in addition to Spanish, many Russian-language communications were being intercepted. "All the communications that we had that were Cuban turned Soviet and we had what had to be called the Soviet forces in Cuba," said Parish. "Suddenly, these Spanish-speaking pilots disappeared and were replaced by Russian pilots. The [Soviet] . . . communications in the HF [high-frequency] area at that time appeared again virtually overnight." 

Intercept operators listened as the ballistic missile sites were dismantled and the SAM sites were turned over to the Cubans. "After the offensive weapons were removed, some of the supportive weapons were also removed," Parish said. Each time a SAM site was turned over to the Cubans, various signals changed. "So we were able through Elint to tell when the Soviets were pulling out of a given SAM site. We got an entire training schedule in Havana where they were talking about how they were going to train the Cubans."

As the Soviets pulled out, NSA detected tense relations between them and Cuban forces. According to Parish, one telephone conversation involved a very large shipment of tainted meat that the Soviets had sent the Cubans. Castro himself was intercepted saying "very, very bad things about the Russians," Parish said. "And in fact we were required to read that over the telephone to—I'm not sure who it was, State Department, CIA, DIA—but we had to have a translator read this sort of verbatim over the line and he [Castro] had some very, very, harsh and bad things to say about the Russians. I do recall the gentleman turning red as he was reading this because they wanted a verbatim translation of it." In fact, the original transcript sent to the White House contained deletions in place of Castro's expletives. Almost immediately Robert Kennedy called NSA and demanded that they send the uncensored version—blue language and all. 

"During the crisis," said Parish, "I have no doubt they [the missile sites] were under Soviet control, and in fact we pretty well know they were totally Soviet manned." According to another NSA official, "There were times when the Cubans and the Soviets were—I don't mean fighting literally, but contesting each other as to who was in charge of the missile site, and you'd hear Spanish cursing in the background and Soviet unhappiness." 

At the time of the crisis, neither the NSA nor the CIA knew whether the Soviets had any nuclear warheads in Cuba. "We had photographs of missile launchers," said Robert McNamara, "but we thought the warheads were yet to come." It was only in the 1990s that the truth was discovered. "It took thirty years to learn there were 161 nuclear warheads there, including 90 tactical warheads to be used against an invasion," McNamara said. Then, holding two fingers a fraction of an inch apart, he added, "And we came that close to an invasion. . . . We came so close— both Kennedy and Khrushchev felt events were slipping outside their control. . . . The world came within a hair breadth of nuclear war." 

As Soviet ships navigated through the Caribbean on their long voyage home, their decks crowded with hastily crated missiles and launchers, Khrushchev may have been chuckling. While the United States focused on the offensive ballistic missiles brought to Cuba, none of which were likely ever to have been used, Khrushchev had been monitoring the progress of a far more secret and far more useful construction project on the island. It was to be a major Soviet intelligence coup. In a sparsely populated area known as Lourdes, just southeast of Havana, Soviet technicians continued work on one of the largest eavesdropping bases ever built. 

NSA surrounded the Soviet Union with listening posts and ferret flights during the 1950s and early 1960s. Every time a new monitoring station was built, Khrushchev felt the electronic noose grow tighter. In Germany, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere, intercept operators noted every time an aircraft took off or a ship left port. Telemetry was collected from Soviet missiles, and telephone conversations were snatched from the air.

Khrushchev knew he could not reciprocate. There were no Soviet allies along America's borders to accommodate Russian eavesdroppers. Thus the USSR was forced to send antenna-covered trawlers crawling along America's coasts. It was a cumbersome and expensive proposition. For every trawler bobbing in the waves, five thousand miles from home, a fleet of support vessels was needed because the trawlers could not pull into port. Fuel had to be supplied, equipment had to be repaired, food had to be delivered, and the endless tapes had to be brought back to Moscow to be analyzed and translated. Castro solved all Khrushchev's problems and provided Moscow with an electronic window on the United States into the twenty-first century. 

Over a vast area of twenty-eight square miles, Soviet engineers and signals intelligence specialists erected acres of antennas to eavesdrop on American communications. Diamond-shaped rhombic antennas, pointing like daggers at the U.S. coast only ninety miles away, tapped into highfrequency signals carrying telephone calls as far away as Washington. Large dishes were set up to collect signals from American satellites. High wires were strung to pick up the very-low-frequency submarine broadcasts. Giant rectangular antennas, like drive-in movie screens, were erected to intercept microwave signals. Windowless cement buildings were built to house the intercept operators, the code-breakers, and the walls of printers that would rattle out miles of intercepted data communications. Khrushchev might have lost a fist, but he had gained an ear. 

With the crisis over and the threat of nuclear war now abated, attention once again turned toward covert operations within Cuba. Earlier, shortly after learning of the offensive missiles on October 15, an angry Robert Kennedy had called a meeting of the Operation Mongoose cabal. He opened the meeting by expressing "the general dissatisfaction of the President" with the progress of Mongoose. He pointed out that the operation had been under way for a year, that the results were discouraging, that there had been no acts of sabotage, and that even the one that had been attempted had failed twice. 

Richard Helms, the CIA's deputy planning director, later commented: "I stated that we were prepared to get on with the new action program and that we would execute it aggressively." NSA, however, discovered that among the sabotage targets of Operation Mongoose were several key Cuban communications facilities—the same facilities that NSA was eavesdropping on, deriving a great deal of signals intelligence. Officials quickly, and loudly, protested. "We suggested to them that it was really not the smartest thing to do," said Hal Parish.

In fact, in the days following the crisis, NSA did everything it could to secretly keep the Cuban telecommunications system fully working. The more communications equipment broke or burned out, the less NSA could intercept, and thus the less the U.S. intelligence community knew about Cuba. Adding to the problems was the economic embargo of Cuba, which kept out critical electrical supplies such as vacuum tubes for military radios. NSA devised a covert channel by which to supply these components to the Cuban government. 

"The tubes would burn out, requests would come in, and backdoor methods had to be utilized in order to get the necessary tubes in to keep this RCA-designed system on the air so we could continue to collect it," said Parish. "I think a lot of them were channeled through Canada at the time, because the Canadians had relations with the Cubans. When the tubes would wear out—these were not small tubes, these were large tubes and components—they would make contact with somebody and the word would reach us and they would come to see the agency, the right part of it, and we would insist that those things be provided." 

As the danger of nuclear war with Russia receded like a red tide, Cuba once again came into full view and the Kennedy administration returned to combat mode. NSA continued to listen with one ear cocked toward Russia and the other toward Cuba. Just before Christmas 1962 McCone wrote to McGeorge Bundy, "NSA will continue an intensive program in the Sigint field, which has during recent weeks added materially to all other intelligence." 

On Havana's doorstep, the civilian-manned USNS Muller relieved the Oxford, and ferret flights kept up their patrols a dozen miles off the Cuban coast. Because the Muller was civilian, its crew got less liberty time than a military crew would, so the ship was able to spend a greater percentage of its time at sea—about twenty-five days a month—than Navy ships such as the Oxford. It was home ported in Port Everglades, the commercial port for Fort Lauderdale. 

"Duty station for the Muller was seven miles off Havana," said Bill Baer, the operations officer on the ship at the time. "We and Castro recognized the six-mile limit, so seven miles was a small safety valve. We traveled back and forth on a six-mile track parallel to the coast. The major reason for this particular spot was a multichannel UHF national communications system that RCA had installed. It ran from Havana, east and west, along the spine of the island and connected Havana with each city in the country." Traveling slowly back and forth, the Muller had a direct tap into much of Cuba's communications.

But the spy ship was no secret from Castro and he would occasionally vent his anger. "We only had a selection of small arms including M-1 rifles, carbines, shotguns, and so forth," recalled Baer. "We took this responsibility very seriously because we knew the Cubans knew who we were and they used to do things to harass us." 

In an unusual move, Baer was made operations officer on the ship even though he was an Army officer. He had been stationed at NSA when he heard of the opening and volunteered. Another Army intercept operator on board was Mike Sannes. "Since they used microwave, we had to be in line-of-sight," Sannes explained. "Castro used to call us the 'big ear.' One time we knew he was going to crash a small plane into us and then board us in an 'act of mercy.' We had a spotter in the mast— remember this is a civilian ship and had no large guns—he saw the plane approaching and we were monitoring on the hand-held radio. Suddenly everything went quiet. A few minutes later he came running in saying, 'I'm not staying up there. He's going to hit us!' They scrambled  some jets from Key West who were on alert, and they chased him off." 

Sannes said Cuban harassment was common. "Often they sent gunboats out to harass us, sometimes every few hours so we couldn't sleep. Occasionally they shot across our bow. We had a real gung-ho skipper. We had scuttles fore and aft. We would have sunk the boat if we were in danger of being boarded. . . . Once the engine quit and we started drifting into shore. It was very early on a foggy morning. We drifted close enough into Havana harbor that we were looking up at the hotels on the beach. We got the engine working and headed back out to sea. They never noticed us." 

To assist the CIA's covert operations in Cuba, NSA intercept operators were assigned to monitor the communications of anti-Castro forces. On January 16 one of these technicians picked up a conversation from an individual in downtown Havana who said, "It would be a good idea to assassinate Fidel on El Cocuyo Road." The intercept operator noted on his report, "This group must be penetrated." 

Amusingly, one of the most important pieces of information to come along came not from an NSA intercept of a diplomatic cable to Moscow but from a ten-hour interview Castro gave to Lisa Howard, a reporter for ABC News. In the interview, Castro clearly indicated for the first time that he was hoping for a rapprochement with the United States. The CIA acquired a transcript of the interview secretly, through an NSA intercept before the broadcast. 

Upon receiving the information, the CIA's John McCone became extremely worried that word would leak out about their possession of it. On May 2, 1963, CIA Deputy Director Marshall Carter wrote to Bundy:

Mr. McCone cabled me this morning stating that he cannot overemphasize the importance of secrecy in this matter and requested that I take all appropriate steps along this line to reflect his personal views on its sensitivity. Mr. McCone feels that gossip and inevitable leaks with consequent publicity would be most damaging. He suggests that no active steps be taken on the rapprochement matter at this time and urges most limited Washington discussions, and that in these circumstances emphasis should be placed in any discussions on the fact that the rapprochement track is being explored as a remote possibility and one of several alternatives involving various levels of dynamic and positive action. In view of the foregoing, it is requested that the Lisa Howard report be handled in the most limited and sensitive manner.

Throughout the summer of 1963, there were endless discussions of sabotage—which targets to strike, what kind of explosives to use, whether the strike should come from inside Cuba or outside it, whether local volunteers or paid agents should be used. But even while the CIA hawks were plotting their campaign of sabotage, a group of Kennedy administration doves, including UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, were working on another track. Attached to Stevenson's UN mission in New York was William Attwood, who had previously served as U.S. ambassador to Guinea in West Africa. Attwood had met Castro and spent considerable time with him on a number of occasions while practicing his earlier profession as a journalist. A Guinean diplomat had told him of a recent meeting with Castro in which the Cuban leader had expressed his dissatisfaction with his status as a Soviet satellite and was looking for a way out. The diplomat told Attwood of Castro's receptiveness to changing course and moving toward nonalignment. Attwood received a similar message from another friend, Lisa Howard. 

As the CIA continued to plot sabotage missions, President Kennedy began to explore Castro's apparent olive branch. He approved a quiet approach by Attwood to Dr. Carlos Lechuga, Cuba's ambassador to the UN, using ABC's Lisa Howard as a go-between. On September 23, a small party was arranged at Howard's New York City apartment and both Lechuga and Attwood were invited. The diplomatic matchmaking was successful. "Lechuga hinted that Castro was indeed in a mood to talk," Attwood said later in a secret memorandum. "Especially with someone he had met before. He thought there was a good chance that I might be invited to Cuba if I wished to resume our 1959 talk." Robert Kennedy thought the idea had some merit but was against Attwood traveling to Cuba; he saw the trip as "risking the accusation that we were trying to make a deal with Castro." Kennedy preferred that the meeting take place either in New York, during a visit by Castro to the UN, or in a neutral country, such as Mexico.  

Howard, continuing in her role as unofficial intermediary, mentioned Attwood to Major Rene Vallejo, a Cuban surgeon who was also Castro's right-hand man and confidant. On October 31, Vallejo called Howard, telling her that Castro would very much like to talk to Attwood anytime and appreciated the importance of discretion to all concerned. Castro, he said, would therefore be willing to secretly send a plane to Mexico to pick up Attwood and fly him to a private airport near Veradero where Castro would talk to him alone. The plane would fly him back immediately after the talk. In this way there would be no risk of identification at Havana airport. 

Vallejo sent a further message to Attwood, through Howard, on November 11. "Castro would go along with any arrangements we might want to make," Attwood wrote in a memorandum. "He specifically suggested that a Cuban plane could come to Key West and pick up the emissary; alternatively they would agree to have him come in a U.S. plane which could land at one of several 'secret airfields' near Havana. He emphasized that only Castro and himself would be present at the talks and that no one else—he specifically mentioned [Che] Guevara— would be involved. Vallejo also reiterated Castro's desire for this talk and hoped to hear our answer soon." 

But President Kennedy insisted that before any U.S. official travel to Cuba, Vallejo or some other Castro representative come to the United States to outline a proposal. He also demanded absolute secrecy concerning the discussions. "At the President's instruction I was conveying this message orally and not by cable," McGeorge Bundy told Attwood, extremely worried about a leak or a written record. He added in a memorandum for the record, "The President hoped he [Attwood] would get in touch with Vallejo to report that it did not seem practicable to us at this stage to send an American official to Cuba and that we would prefer to begin with a visit by Vallejo to the U.S. where Attwood would be glad to see him and to listen to any messages he might bring from Castro." 

Attwood passed the message through Howard to Vallejo, and a few days later they spoke together on the telephone for the first time. One Friday, he sent a memorandum to the White House detailing the conversation. "Vallejo's manner was extremely cordial," Attwood noted. "He said that 'we' would send instructions to Lechuga to propose and discuss with me 'an agenda' for a later meeting with Castro. I said I would await Lechuga's call." 

But President Kennedy did not see Attwood's memorandum. At the moment it arrived he was traveling in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.

That Friday, November 22, 1963, was much like any other day at NSA. In the early morning hours, Cuban intercepts from the ferret ship USNS Muller had ricocheted off the moon and down to NSA. The backlogged Cuban analysts and cryptologists of B Group were only now putting out translations of messages intercepted weeks earlier. One of those was a report by a Cuban official on the country's internal problems with rebels. "I believe that the approaching Presidential elections in the United States will strengthen reactionary forces from within and without," said the worried official. "Therefore, there is a need for a strong gorilla [sic] collar around Cuba." 

In the courtyard in front of the main building, a powerful yellow steam shovel was scooping up tons of dirt for the large basement of the new nine-story, 511,000-square-foot headquarters tower as the agency continued to expand. Other heavy equipment was clearing dense woodlands for more than 1,200 new parking spaces. 

In Room 1W040, the cover for the next edition for the NSA Newsletter was being laid out. It was a drawing of Santa Claus jumping out of a fireplace, with the headline "Sixth NSA Annual Family Christmas Program, Dec. 8, 2:00 PM." A line of employees, getting ready for the weekend, was forming at the NSA Federal Credit Union, which had grown to 5,647 members. At 11:30 A.M., in Room 1W128, the NSA Sun, Snow and Surf Club was holding its second annual Ski Fashion Show. As part of the show, the main lobby of the Operations Building contained a large display of the latest skis, boots, and other equipment. Later that night, the NSA Drama Club was scheduled to present the rueful comedy The Pleasure of His Company at the Fort Meade Service Club. 

That Friday was slow in the NSA Sigint Command Center. The duty officer logged some messages in; Sergeant Holtz arrived at ten o'clock to pick up a few tapes; at 1:30 P.M. a Strategic Air Command surveillance mission codenamed Brass Knob sent a preflight message. Five minutes later, couriers assigned to secretly collect cables from Western Union and the other communications companies over the weekend were briefed. 

Then, at 1:36, a bulletin flashed over the radio. Don Gardiner of the ABC radio network cut into a local program to report that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. NSA Director Gordon Blake was sitting at his desk in his third-floor office when he heard the news. At the White House, crowded around a large circular table in the West Basement's staff mess, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was deep in debate following a late lunch. Across the Potomac, General Maxwell Taylor and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were meeting in the Pentagon's Gold Room with the commanders of the West German Bundeswehr. Down the hall in his E-Ring office, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was discussing the $50 billion budget with a half-dozen aides.

At the CIA, Director John McCone was finishing lunch with a small group of fellow spies in his private dining room. His deputy, Marshall Carter, was quail shooting at the Farm, the secret CIA training facility on the York River near Williamsburg, Virginia. "When this monstrously terrible thing happened," Carter wrote several days later, "we returned at once. . . . He was a great and good and totally dedicated, totally selfless man—our national blessing is that President Johnson is too." 

At fourteen minutes past two, General Blake sent out a message alerting all NSA stations and listening posts. Twenty-two minutes later he sent out another message over NSA's restricted communications links. "President Kennedy is dead." At the eavesdropping base at Kamiseya in Japan, the operations center suddenly went quiet. George Morton stopped what he was doing. "Thousands upon thousands of miles away," he later said, "someone had shot my commander-in-chief. I could not believe it. Neither could anyone else." In South Africa, NSA's spy ship the USNS Valdez was docked in Capetown. One of the crewmembers, Dave Ball, who had once served as a cook for President Kennedy, held a moving memorial service. 

As the world mourned, NSA continued to eavesdrop. Immediately after the assassination, NSA initiated a large-scale manual and computer review of all available signals intelligence information, including all traffic between the United States and Cuba. At the time, NSA was intercepting about 1,000 messages a day worldwide. Suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's name was entered into the computer search. A short time later, additional names provided by the FBI from Oswald's address book were added. At the same time, between twenty-five and fifty analysts manually reviewed all traffic between Cuba and New Orleans and Cuba and Dallas, and some traffic between Cuba and Russia. 

Fifteen hundred miles to the south, Navy intercept operators, monitoring both Cuban and "Soviet Forces Cuba" communications, listened in as Cuban military forces were placed on high alert. "A state of alert is ordered for all personnel," said the intercepted message. "Be ready to repel aggression." A message intercepted from the Polish embassy in Havana indicated that "military units are being relocated" and a new military draft was called. Intercepts flooded in from other listening posts. Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia also suddenly went on alert. One foreign ambassador in Havana cabled home a report of a large movement of troops, adding a note about Castro: "I got the immediate impression that on this occasion he was frightened, if not terrified."

From early intercepts of Cuban diplomatic communications, it was clear that, far from being involved, Castro's people were as mystified by the assassination as the rest of the world. "The assassination of Kennedy," said one message from Havana to its embassy in Mexico City, "was a provocation against world peace, perfectly and thoroughly planned by the most reactionary sectors of the United States." An intercept of a message from Brazil's ambassador to Cuba back to his Foreign Office indicated that Cuban officials "were unanimous in believing that any other president would be 'even worse' " than Kennedy. 

Many of the intercepts to and from foreign embassies in Washington were acquired as a result of secret agreements between NSA and the major U.S. telecommunications companies, such as Western Union. Under the NSA program codenamed Shamrock, the companies agreed to illegally hand over to NSA couriers, on a daily basis, copies of all the cables sent to, from or through the U.S. This was the preferred method of communications for most of the foreign diplomatic establishments in Washington and New York. Highly secret messages were sent the same way, but written in code or cipher. The NSA's Vint Hill Farms Station eavesdropped on those diplomatic facilities that used their own high-frequency equipment to communicate. Still other intercepts flowed into NSA from the agency's worldwide listening posts. 

In the hours and days following the assassination, a wide variety of intercepts poured into NSA. The diplomatic wires were heavy with speculation about America's future and details concerning preparations for the funeral. Shortly after the assassination, NSA intercepted a message between Chile's ambassador to Washington and his Foreign Ministry in Santiago. "In diplomatic circles," he noted, "it is believed that, in the absence of other Democratic figures of the first rank who could aspire to the presidency in the November 1964 election, the present Attorney General becomes, with the death of President Kennedy, the first choice to succeed him for the presidential term which will begin in January 1965." He added, "News has just arrived that at 1438 [2:38 P.M.] (Eastern time) Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office as President of the United States before a federal district judge." 

Egyptian diplomats speculated that Kennedy was assassinated as a result of his stand on racial equality. Dutch intercepts showed uncertainty over whether foreign ambassadors would be invited to the funeral. The Argentine ambassador told Buenos Aires that the assassination "will considerably weaken in the next few months the international policy of the West, particularly with regard to the USSR." He then said, for NSA, the worst words imaginable. "I shall continue to report via air mail." A listening post eavesdropping on Turkish diplomatic communications picked up a comment by the American ambassador to Turkey fixing blame for the murder. "After signing the register which is open in the American Embassy in Ankara on the occasion of the death of Kennedy, I saw the American Ambassador. He is of the opinion that Russia and Cuba had a finger in the assassination."

The United Nations was also an important target for NSA. In a message transmitted back to the Middle East, a delegation of Palestinians blamed the assassination on a Jewish plot: "Behind the mysterious crime is a carefully plotted Zionist conspiracy. The late President was likely to win the coming presidency elections without supplicating the Zionist sympathy or seeking the Jews [sic] vote. Aware of the fact that their influence and power in the United States are based upon the Jews vote, the Zionists murdered the courageous President who was about to destroy that legend of theirs. His assassination is a warning to the rest of the honorable leaders. Reveal their conspiracy to the supreme judgement of the world. Be careful, you are the hope of the Palestinians." Likewise, the Italian ambassador to Syria cabled Rome saying that the government in Damascus saw Zionism behind the murder. 

A diplomat in Leopoldville, in Congo, reported: "Certain ill-intentioned persons are rejoicing over the death of the President of the United States of America, considering that grievous event a sign of victory for them." The Argentine ambassador to Budapest reported that the Hungarian people "were deeply touched," and that the government attributed the killing to "fascist elements inspired by racial hatred." The Polish ambassador to the United Nations expressed his concern to Warsaw over the "alarming . . . anti-Communist hysteria that has been turned on." 

The day after the assassination, intercept operators picked up a statement by Castro: "In spite of the antagonism existing between the Government of the United States and the Cuban Revolution, we have received the news of the tragic death of President Kennedy with deep sorrow. All civilized men always grieve about such events as this. Our delegation to the Organization of the United Nations wishes to state that this is the feeling of the people and of the Government of Cuba." This was a generous statement, considering that Kennedy had spent the past two years waging a secret war against him and that CIA agents had plotted his murder. 

In the aftermath of the assassination, Meredith K. Gardner, one of NSA's top Soviet codebreakers, was assigned to examine a number of items taken from assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and suspected to contain codes or ciphers. The Warren Commission, charged with investigating the assassination, was particularly intrigued by a Russian novel, Glaza Kotorye Sprashivayut ("Questioning Eyes"). Oswald had apparently cut eight letters out of page 152. But this was too little to go on. "The manner of perforating only a few letters," wrote Gardner, "does not conform to any known system. . . . We believe, nevertheless, that it is most likely that the letters were cut out for some purpose related to Oswald's photographic experiments."

Oswald's Soviet-made portable radio receiver was also examined, "with negative results." Also, wrote Gardner in his internal NSA report, "the names appearing in Lee's and [his wife] Marina's address books have been checked against NSA files but no Comint references have been discovered. ... In addition to the information on the addresses developed in the personality check, a separate study of NSA address files is being made. While this study is not yet complete, results have so far been negative and there is no reason to expect that anything beyond what the personality check has already turned up will be discovered." 

Finally, Gardner noted, "The appearance of the term 'micro dots' on page 44 of Lee Oswald's address book aroused our suspicions, particularly in that it was associated with the address of the photographic firm where he was once employed." 

The mention of NSA's Comint files and the possibility of microdots became a sensitive issue within NSA. Frank Rowlett, special assistant to Director Blake, hid any reference to them from the final report sent to the Warren Commission. In a memorandum to Deputy Director Tordella, Rowlett wrote, "I have eliminated two items from the original Memorandum for the Record. . . . These are the references to 'micro dots' . . . and the Comint reference." He added, "I suggest that you informally (possibly by telephone) call the Commission's attention to the appearance of the term 'micro dot' on page 44 of Oswald's address book. You might indicate that this reference aroused our suspicion but that we do not feel competent to make an exhaustive examination of the materials for the presence of micro dots—such an examination should be conducted by the FBI or CIA. If micro dots are actually found, we would be happy to collaborate to the fullest degree required in the analysis of these dots." 

Rowlett was also worried about letting the commission know of NSA's highly secret communications intelligence data base. "I do not believe a statement that we have checked the names against the NSA files needs to be made since ... it identifies the existence of sensitive Comint records." Tordella agreed, and the sanitized report was sent to the commission. 

Shortly after the assassination, Lisa Howard told Attwood that she had been contacted by Dr. Lechuga. Lechuga said that he had received a letter from Castro authorizing him to have the discussion with Attwood earlier requested by Kennedy. Howard passed the message on to Attwood, who later that day met with Lechuga for the first time. After expressing his condolences, Lechuga confirmed that he had been authorized to begin preliminary talks with him; however, he made no mention of the letter from Castro. Then, in light of the assassination, Lechuga inquired as to how things now stood. Attwood said he would have to let him know.

Gordon Chase of the National Security Council later discussed the matter in a memorandum to Bundy. "The ball is in our court," he wrote. "Bill owes Lechuga a call. What to do? Bill thinks that we have nothing to lose in listening to what Castro has to say; there is no commitment on our side. Also, it would be very interesting to know what is in the letter. I am also dying to know what's in the letter and two weeks ago I would not have hesitated. But things are different now, particularly with this Oswald business. At a minimum, such a talk would really have to be a non-event. I, for one, would want to think this one over carefully. . . . They also agreed, that from this point on, there was no further need to use Lisa Howard as an intermediary." 

"I assume you will want to brief the President," Chase wrote in another memorandum to Bundy. It now seemed a million years since Kennedy had given his okay to the peace feeler. Chase was convinced that any hope for normalization had died with the late president. "The events of November 22 would appear to make accommodation with Castro an even more doubtful issue than it was," he said. "While I think that President Kennedy could have accommodated with Castro and gotten away with it with a minimum of domestic heat, I'm not sure about President Johnson. For one thing, a new President who has no background of being successfully nasty to Castro and the Communists (e.g. President Kennedy in October, 1962) would probably run a greater risk of being accused, by the American people, of 'going soft.' " 

The Cubans, too, knew that the moment Kennedy died, so did any chance of reestablishing normal relations with the United States. "Lechuga," Atwood wrote Chase, "and the Cubans in general, probably feel that the situation has changed since President Kennedy's assassination. Deep down, they probably don't expect anything hopeful from us." If contacts were to continue, Atwood said, he wanted to call Lechuga within a couple of weeks; otherwise, the matter "would lose momentum and wither on the vine." 

But Lyndon Johnson had no interest in accommodation. Instead, he moved the entire issue of Cuba back to square one. In a memorandum following his first meeting with the new president, CIA Director John McCone noted, "He asked . . . how we planned to dispose of Castro." Johnson later approved a return to the bankrupt and ineffective policies of sabotage and covert action. 

Two weeks later, on New Year's Day, 1964, ABC News aired an exclusive interview with Fidel Castro. Among those watching was the French ambassador to Washington. On January 3, he wired a summary of the interview back to Paris: "Until the tragic death of President Kennedy, he [Castro] thought that the normalization of Cuban relations with the American administration was possible. . . . He appeared 'full of hope' as to the future of his relations with President Johnson." The message was intercepted by NSA and passed on to the White House.

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