PART 5:BODY OF SECRETS...EARS

CHAPTER SIX 

EARS 

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As Nate Gerson's plane approached Churchill, a windy, desolate icebox on the western shore of Canada's Hudson Bay, he may have looked out and had the same thought as another visitor: "Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles." In 1957, NSA asked the physicist to find a way to capture valuable but elusive Soviet whispers as they drifted over the North Pole and into Canada. For a number of years, Canada had maintained a bizarre listening post near Churchill—a ship on stilts. Like a steel ark, it sat high above a sea of giant rhombic eavesdropping antennas planted in the tundra and pointing in every direction. 

But rather than listening to Soviet bomber pilots, Gerson and an NSA colleague ended up spending two days and nights in the wardroom of the landed ship playing liar's dice with the intercept operators. As a result of unique atmospheric conditions, no signals of any type could get through. They had been absorbed like a sponge by the auroral sky. Gerson knew that the only way to get around the problem was to move farther north— way north—as close to Russia as they could get. His idea was to build a listening post north of all human habitation on the planet, on a speck of land less than five hundred miles from the North Pole: Alert. Like a beacon, it sits on the northern tip of desolate Ellesmere, an Arctic island nearly the size of England and Scotland combined but with a population of less than a hundred permanent residents. It was hell in reverse, a place of six-month nights where marrow freezes in the bone. The nearest tree is more than fifteen hundred miles south. 

Unknown, even today, is the spy war that raged at the top of the world—the true Cold War. Here, the two superpowers came closest together—and were even joined, during the bitter winter, when America's Little Diomede Island and Russia's Big Diomede Island were linked by an ice bridge. It was also each nation's Achilles' heel, where the distances were too great and the living conditions too intolerable to maintain an effective manned defense. "Study your globe," warned General Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, the former chief of the Army Air Force, "and you will see the most direct routes [between the United States and Russia] are not across the Atlantic or Pacific, but through the Arctic." If a third world war were to break out, Arnold cautioned, "its strategic center will be the North Pole." The Arctic was also the perfect place for both sides to engage in a wizard war of electronic eavesdropping. 

During the late 1950s and the 1960s, both superpowers secretly used drifting ice islands for espionage. Born of ancient glaciers, the barren wastelands are made of freshwater and can be 150 feet thick or more. They drift slowly in long, circular patterns close to the North Pole. Teams of scientists and intelligence officers would be placed on the dangerous ice floes for up to a year at a time. As the floe migrated through the Arctic Sea, like a ghost ship adrift and lost, the polar spies used advanced acoustical equipment to detect hostile subs, while special antennas and receivers eavesdropped on the other side. 

It was a perilous way to spy. On September 23, 1958, Air Force Captain James F. Smith, an intelligence officer, Russian linguist, and Arctic survival expert, stepped from a small plane onto Drifting Station Alpha. Alpha was a barren oval chunk of floating drift ice less than a mile long, a hundred or so miles from the North Pole. It was home to nineteen other scientists and technicians. Smith had been assigned to command the outpost for the next year, but within weeks of his arrival conditions turned severe. A punishing Arctic storm with fierce winds and brutal currents threatened to break up the portion of the ice island where most of the structures and equipment were located. Wood buildings had to be moved to a safer location; some tore apart and were lost in the process. 

A second storm followed a week later, causing nearly a third of the ice floe to break away—and then came still another storm, this one "with particularly vicious winds," noted Smith. It closed the improvised runway, pushing it farther from the camp and covering it with waist-high drifts of rock-hard snow. Despite the continuous night, sleeping was sometimes difficult because of the Arctic Sea's unearthly chant. 

"Standing at the edge of the camp floe," Smith wrote, "one could hear the soft rumbling and feel vibrations, occasionally punctuated by sharp cracks, grinding and crashes as large pieces were forced up, broke and tumbled." 

With great difficulty, the runway was reopened. Smith recommended the evacuation of half the staff until conditions stabilized. Two rescue missions were launched but had to turn back because of severe weather. Then yet another storm struck, the fourth in less than six weeks. Sharp cracks with sawtooth edges like pinking shears zigzagged across the ice and extended into the camp. Forty percent of the micro-island broke away, and the runway was severed. In the oily darkness of the Arctic night, one of the men turned a flashlight to the gaping crevasse and exclaimed, "Ten feet wide and ten thousand feet deep." 

Nevertheless, the team was able to convert one section of the runway into a useable landing strip. With a warning that another major storm was due within twenty-four hours, Smith finally had some luck. He was notified that a C-123 aircraft from Thule, Greenland, would arrive shortly. Quickly abandoning all they could not carry, the team rushed to the landing strip. Minutes later the plane touched down, sending a white cloud into the black sky. Then, almost immediately, it was airborne once again, loaded with the twenty men and their few belongings. Drifting Station Alpha, and all its equipment, was abandoned to the ruthless, grinding polar sea. 

But the advantages of spying from the ice cap were irresistible. A permanent listening post at Alert, Nate Gerson concluded, would allow the United States and Canada to eavesdrop on Soviet signals obtainable only near the North Pole. "Reception at the polar cap site of Alert," he said, "would avoid the large number of auroral absorption events found at Churchill. It would also permit the West to gain knowledge that the Soviets already had obtained from observations at their periodic experimental sites on the Arctic Ocean ice pack." Canada's equivalent of the NSA, then known as the Communications Branch of the National Research Council (CBNRC), ran the operation. "Don McLeish [of the CBNRC] later told me," said Gerson, " 'We do not acknowledge the existence of CBNRC.' NSA had the same philosophy." 

Once the listening post was established, said Gerson, "we considered the possibility of intercepting Soviet signals between thirty and fifty megahertz at Alert via auroral E ionization. We instituted a test similar to what the Soviets had done on their ice floe station, which recorded at Alert instances when signals in this frequency band could be received." 

Then, as now, Alert is the "most northern permanently inhabited settlement in the world," according to a booklet issued to employees at the listening post. In the early 1960s, it employed about a hundred people. Ten years later the number had doubled, and in the early 1990s Alert's population was about 180. On a mantle of ice more than half a mile thick, the human population of Ellesmere Island is dwarfed by herds of musk oxen—children of the ice age—and snow-white wolves. Robert E. Peary used the island as a base for his 1909 expedition to the North Pole.

Since it was first established in the late 1950s, Alert has been Canada's most important listening post for eavesdropping on Russia. China is also a target. Yet it is so far north that it is unable to communicate with Ottawa using satellites in stationary orbits over the equator. A relay station farther south is required, in Eureka on Ellesmere Island. Until a recent upgrade in communications, it was necessary to fly all the intercept tapes to Ottawa on weekly flights by Hercules aircraft. 

According to Gerson, one of the NSA's pioneers in signals intelligence from space, at one point Russian and Canadian eavesdroppers nearly came eye to eye when a Soviet ice station drifted almost into Canadian territorial waters near Alert. Communications to and from these stations were a target of the listening post. In fact, intelligence interest was so great in the Russian floating espionage platforms that a highly secret and extremely dangerous operation was conducted in an attempt to find out just how sophisticated the icy spy bases were. 

On April 27, 1959, the Soviets set up a base on a 4½ -mile-long ice floe about halfway between Russia's Wrangel Island, near western Alaska, and the North Pole. Named North Pole 8, for three years the station drifted slowly with the current, creeping northward toward the pole at about two miles a day. On the remote floating island, reminders were everywhere of the place they had left behind, from large wall posters in the mess hall showing workers honoring Lenin, to pictures of pinup girls hanging in the sleeping quarters. In free moments, technicians would occasionally prop themselves on the edge of the ice dressed only in swim trunks for a picture to take back home. 

Like America's Drifting Station Alpha, North Pole 8 was a troublesome hunk of ice. Twice it was necessary to relocate the entire camp because of jagged cracks that cut across the runway. In the winter of 1962, ravaging storms forced the station's commander, I. P. Romanov, to order an emergency evacuation. As powerful pressure ridges threatened to turn the island into ice cubes, crew members rushed for the rescue aircraft, leaving behind uneaten food still on the dinner table and a wide assortment of equipment. Light planes had been used because of the damaged runway. On March 19, 1962, after 1,055 days of continuous occupation, the station was finally abandoned. 

For nearly a year, since 1961, Leonard A. LeSchack, a lieutenant (junior grade) in the Office of Naval Research (ONR), had been working on a highly secret project aimed at discovering just what kind of spy equipment the Russians used on their ice stations. Now, with the abandonment of North Pole 8, he had found his perfect island. The son of Russian immigrants, LeSchack had turned twenty-seven less than two weeks earlier. He had studied geology in college and soon after graduation was chosen to take part in an exploration of Antarctica as part of the International Geophysical Year. In search of more adventure, LeSchack signed up for Naval Officers' Candidate School and after receiving his gold bars talked his way into an assignment on an ice island. Later, while assigned to ONR in Washington, he learned about the Russian abandonment of North Pole 8. 

LeSchack knew that getting onto the deserted island with its damaged runway was not that difficult. The two-man inspection team could simply parachute in. The problem was getting them out: the station had no runway, it was too far for helicopter assistance, and it was too iced in for ships. But the junior officer had an idea: a low-flying plane could snatch the men out. LeSchack knew that a method had been developed for extracting clandestine CIA agents from denied territory such as China. The system was a modification of a technique used for the airborne pickup of mail pouches. The mail sack would be attached to a transfer wire strung between two poles. The plane would fly low and slow over the long transfer wire and a hook would grab hold of it. Crewmembers would then reel in the mailbag. 

The system had been developed by Robert Edison Fulton, Jr., a professional inventor, and LeSchack asked him to modify it for use on his project. It was simple yet finely tuned. The person to be retrieved wore a harness connected to a long nylon lift line. A weather balloon would then raise the lift line five hundred feet. The retrieval aircraft would fly at the line and snag it in a V-shaped yoke attached to the nose. The weather balloon would release and the plane would gradually pull the person upward; his or her body would assume a position parallel to the ground. A winch would then be used to pull him through a hatch in the plane. Experiments, first with sandbags, then with sheep and pigs, and finally with a human, proved the device worked. 

Armed with the Fulton Skyhook, LeSchack won approval for Operation Coldfeet. To get the men covertly to and from the Russian ice island, LeSchack turned to the CIA. The agency authorized the use of its secret proprietary airline, Intermountain Aviation, based at Marana Air Park north of Tucson, Arizona. 

In late May 1962, as the long clutch of winter gave way to above-zero temperatures, the team gathered at Barrow, on the northern tip of Alaska. After several days of searching, the ragged, abandoned Soviet ice base was located. LeSchack and his partner, Air Force Captain James F. Smith, the intelligence officer and Russian linguist who had survived a harrowing several months on Drift Station Alpha, boarded the CIA's B-17 for the long flight to North Pole 8. More than six hours later, in the twenty-four-hour daylight, the plane reached the vicinity of the island. The plane's pilot, Connie M. Seigrist, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs, was astonished. "It was the most desolate, inhospitable-looking, and uninviting place I had ever seen," he recalled. 

A short time later, Seigrist spotted the chalky white oval, dotted with small buildings. In the back of the plane, an adrenaline rush hit Smith and LeSchack. After once again checking his main and reserve parachutes, Smith went first, hitting the frigid air as if it were a wall of ice and then almost impaling himself on one of the tall Russian antennas. Then LeSchack dove in and, after a sharp tug on his straps, drifted slowly down to a feather landing in the soft snow. 

After a night of rest on Russian bunks, they began exploring the ghost land. Like anthropologists discovering a long-lost civilization, they were surprised by what they saw. "What a horror!" LeSchack exclaimed when he entered the kitchen. "Food was still on the stove, frozen in greasy skillets. There was dried blood all over, and animal carcasses, including dog carcasses, were lying around in an adjacent shed." There were films for entertainment; the walls were plastered with posters exhorting the polar spies to work hard for the Communist Party. Over the next few days, the two Americans conducted a detailed exploration of every part of the floe. Film was found of North Pole 8's crew; there was a shot of a burly Russian sunbathing on the ice in his trunks. Personal mementos had been left behind in the scramble to escape. In one letter, a mother admonished her son to bundle up in plenty of clothes. Photographs were taken of equipment suspected of being used for acoustical surveillance and of the antenna field and ionospheric laboratory that had likely been used for eavesdropping. 

On May 31, a CIA plane with a strange forklike contraption on the nose set out to retrieve Smith and LeSchack. But the ice floe had been lost. Several days went by, and more missions, but North Pole 8 had disappeared in a bewildering sea of white. From the plane, the Arctic Ocean resembled the cracked shell of a hard-boiled egg, splintered into small fragments. On one of those fragments, the two Americans continued cataloging items as they waited for their pickup. They had enough food, and weather conditions were good. 

Finally, on June 2, while he was lugging gear on a toboggan to one of the huts, LeSchack heard the plane. He instantly began jumping up and down and signaling with his arms. As the CIA plane flew into position, Smith and LeSchack prepared to be yanked off the island. Three balloons were inflated, including one for a duffle bag of Russian papers, film, gear, and other salvaged items. The Intermountain B-17 made a long, slow pass and snatched up the booty bag with no trouble. Now it was LeSchack's turn. 

Aboard the plane, pilot Seigrist was struggling to avoid vertigo as white merged with white. "Instantly upon loss of sight of the buildings," he recalled, "the horizon definition disappeared into the gray ice crystal dominated atmosphere. I was instantly in a situation that could be imagined as flying in a void."

Three hundred feet below, LeSchack was having his own problems. Holding the balloon like a child at a fair, he went to a clear spot for pickup. But as he released the helium-filled bag, it was caught by a sudden updraft. The nylon line should have gone five hundred feet straight up, but instead strong winds aloft made it ascend at an angle. LeSchack became almost weightless. The balloon then began dragging him backward toward a dangerous ridge. As he bounced against the hard snow, unable to stop himself, LeSchack tried frantically to grab onto something, anything, to keep himself from being dragged. His face mask twisted, cutting off his vision. Finally, after endless seconds, he was able to plow small holes in the ice and snow with his mitten-covered hands. This gave him just enough traction to slow and then stop. 

Unable to assume the standard sitting position, he just lay motionless on the ice. Moments later he felt a jerk and was airborne, but this time he was being lifted by the B-17 and not the wind. The awkward position in which he'd been picked up caused him difficulties. He was dragged by the plane as if water-skiing on his belly behind a superfast speedboat. But six and a half minutes after the Skyhook plucked him off North Pole 8, he was safely pulled into the tail of the spy plane. 

Aware of LeSchack's difficulties, Smith attempted to hold on to a  tractor when he released his balloon but lost his grip and also became a human sled. For more than two hundred feet, on his way toward the Arctic Ocean, he bounced and banged against sharp ice projections until he managed to catch his heel in a ridge. Seconds later he felt like Peter Pan. "I was flying," he recalled. The Skyhook raised him as though in an elevator at first and then slowly turned him horizontal. Minutes later the tail position operator reeled him in like a prize marlin, his third catch of the day. 

Back in Washington, analysts went over LeSchack and Smith's 300- plus photographs, 83 documents, and 21 pieces of equipment. Much of the gear, they concluded, was "superior in quality to comparable U.S. equipment." They also found empty cartons for thousand-foot reels of magnetic tape, the sort used for recording signals intelligence, but no tapes. And although they found a number of radio-related items and manuals, they turned up no undersea acoustic equipment. Whatever had existed was likely dumped off the island. As for the used magnetic tapes, the Russians probably took them along. 

By 1961, following the enormous financial and intellectual push given the agency during the last few years of the Eisenhower administration, NSA was slowly beginning to emerge from its cocoon. Its budget had risen to an impressive $116.2 million, of which $34.9 million was for research and development of new computers and eavesdropping equipment. More and more the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department were depending on NSA signals intelligence. Although still unable to penetrate high-level Soviet ciphers, the agency had broken the cipher systems of more than forty nations, including Italy, France, the United Arab Republic, Indonesia, Uruguay, and even some Soviet satellite countries, such as Yugoslavia. Some breaks relied more on deception than on cryptanalytic skill or brute force. The codes and ciphers of Turkey, for example, were obtained by bribing a code clerk in Washington. 

Around the world, on land, in the air, at sea, and even in space, NSA was extending its reach. Throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere, listening posts were growing like steel weeds to snare every escaping signal from the Communist East and West. More than 6,000 operators manned over 2,000 intercept positions around the world. 

The polar regions continued to be prime locations for listening posts. On barren, ice-locked islands off Alaska, shivering intercept operators kept the NSA's electronic ear cocked day and night toward the Bering Sea and Siberia's frozen frontier. "I can't go there, it's too cold," thought Navy intercept operator Mike Stockmeier when he received his orders to a remote, foreboding corner of Alaska's Kodiak Island. It was a place known less for humans than for powerful brown bears, some of which, when about to attack, stood ten feet tall on their hind legs. Landing at a small airstrip on the island, Stockmeier was met by a hearty, bearded fellow cryptologist. "He appeared to be straight off the sled dog track," recalled Stockmeier, "as he quickly helped us pack our seabags in the carry-all for the three-hour ride." Their destination, over a narrow, winding road, was Cape Chiniak on the easternmost point of the island. 

By the mid-1960s, the snug listening post at Cape Chiniak, nestled beneath sheltering, ice-sculptured peaks, had grown to about sixty men. A dog named Sam in a Navy sweater "kept us safe from whatever roamed free on Kodiak," said Stockmeier. From the sea, colliding low-pressure systems often brought howling sixty-knot gales and pea-soup visibility. 

"The Hole," Stockmeier said, referring to the operations building, "could be a taxing place to work. From the door combo which sometimes required the oncoming watch to chip away the ice to find the numbers, to battling the cold drafts and sometime snow flurries which found their way under the shack and up through various holes in the deck [floor], people manned their post through all adversity." 

At the center of the Hole sat the heavy base of the tall intercept and direction-finding antenna. The device protruded through the roof like a steel tree, snaring signals from the Soviet Northern Fleet. As it slowly rotated, reflecting the low Arctic sun, it helped pinpoint the location of warships and submarines as they transmitted messages to their shore bases. These coordinates were then transmitted to Net Control in Wahiawa, Hawaii.

The least desirable chore was destroying the overflowing cans of ashes after the highly secret intercept reports had been shredded and then burned. "The most exciting part of burn detail was dumping the ashes," said Stockmeier. "This meant dumping the ashes in the ocean—not easy to do—or driving down to Chiniak Creek and probably having to chop a hole in the ice and dumping the ashes to be washed out to sea." 

Among the harshest assignments was Adak, an unforgiving rock lost in the Bering Sea at the tail end of the Aleutian chain. One veteran of the listening post, Edward Bryant Bates, put his memories to rhyme:

Cold and icy blue, as it appeared from offshore view 

Tundra grass in tufts and bands 

Pushing up through snow and hard coastal sands 

Clam Lagoon, where G.I. tents of olive green 

White blanketed by snow kept most unseen 

One small Quonset hut aside; where secret 'orange' messages in airspace tried to hide...

"I have been told by a native of this forsaken land," Karl Beeman wrote during his tour, "that the island is gradually making progress in the general direction of the Arctic Circle due entirely to the unbelievable strength of the winds." Beeman studied art at Harvard before entering the Navy and winding up at Adak. On a day off he went for a brief hike toward Mount Moffett, a towering peak a few miles from the listening post. The morning was clear and the sun was strong but on a spit of land near the icy sea he became disoriented and then stranded. Days later rescue workers found his body. Unable to free himself, trapped in the brutal winds he had earlier written about, he preferred death, committing suicide with a gun he was carrying. 

While some listening posts were built in icy Arctic wastelands, others sat on mountaintops or hung precariously on the edge of cliffs. Among the most secret was an isolated monitoring station on the shores of the Caspian Sea in northern Iran. Set against a rugged, boulder-strewn background, the snow-white, pockmarked radomes—ball-shaped radar domes—made the station look like an advanced moon base. Run by the CIA, it had a unique mission. 

Although the effort to locate Soviet early-warning radars along border areas had been growing in success, finding radars hidden deep inside the USSR had proved nearly impossible. But then someone remembered an incident at Cape Canaveral: during the test launch of a Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile, a signal from a ground-based radar a thousand miles away had bounced off the IRBM and reflected down to the Cape. The CIA had used the experience to develop a system codenamed Melody, which they placed on the banks of the Caspian Sea. The idea of Melody was to focus Elint antennas on Soviet ballistic missiles during their test flights and follow their trajectory. The experiment worked beyond expectations. The intercept antennas were able to pick up signals from Soviet high-powered radars well over the horizon as they bounced off the missiles. Eventually, over the years, the Caspian Sea station was able to produce an electronic map of virtually all the ground-based Soviet missile-tracking radars, including the antiballistic missile radar systems at a test range a thousand miles away. 

But Melody was not as successful in locating early-warning radars, especially a new surface-to-air missile system codenamed Tall King. At the time, it was considered essential to map all the Tall King radars to prevent the shootdown of American bombers in the event of war. Also, the CIA had a peacetime interest in knowing the locations of all surface to-air missile bases. The agency was then completing work on a superfast, super-high-flying successor to the U-2, codenamed Oxcart. (The SR-71 would be a later variant.) Because Soviet missiles were reaching ever greater heights, and because the Oxcart was designed to overfly Russia, discovering the precise locations of these potentially deadly radar systems was vital. 

The solution was to be found on the moon. Scientists determined that Tall King radar signals, traveling in a straight line, would eventually collide with the moon at least part of the day. The trick would be to catch the signals as they bounced back to earth. To accomplish this, a complex "catcher's mitt" was built. Near Moorestown, New Jersey, a giant sixty foot satellite dish was aimed at the lunar surface. Attached to it were very sensitive Elint receivers tuned to the Tall King frequency. Over time, as the earth and moon revolved and rotated, all of the Tall King radars eventually came within view and were charted. 

Still other listening posts rose like desert flowers in the African sands. At Wheelus Air Base in Libya, a thousand miles of sand surrounded American eavesdroppers on three sides, with 500 miles of Mediterranean to the north. "Even though we were on the coast," said an intercept operator who was assigned to the Air Force 6934th Radio Squadron Mobile during the 1950s, "temperatures reached 110—120 degrees when a sandstorm (or ghiblis as they are called) rolled in. All air stopped blowing and you're burning up." But the desert listening post was an excellent place to eavesdrop on Soviet high-frequency communications. "In my time in Libya, we copied most everything out of Russia," he said, "all the way to Vladivostok submarine pens in the Sea of Japan." 

Antennas also sprang up where Allied bombs once fell. In Germany and Japan, dozens of listening posts were built amid the ruins of former enemy naval and military bases. In Berlin, the rubble from the war was bulldozed into an enormous man made mountain outside the center of the city, in the Teufelsberg district. On top of that mountain, the highest point around, the Army Security Agency built a listening post that became one of NSA's most important ears on Soviet and East German communications throughout the Cold War. Known as Field Station, Berlin, it held the unique distinction of twice winning NSA's prestigious Travis Trophy for best worldwide listening post. 

For several years in the mid-1980s, intercept operators were mystified because during the same two weeks every year they could pick up key East Bloc signals unobtainable at any other time. Eventually they realized that those two weeks coincided with the American cultural festival. Suddenly someone noticed the giant Ferris wheel. "It was acting as a great big antenna," said Bill McGowan, who was an Army captain working at the listening post. "We got excellent reception. One year we went and asked them to leave it up for another month." 

Once the North Sea port for the German navy's mighty fleet, Bremerhaven became another major eavesdropping site targeting Soviet bloc ships and submarines. Aubrey Brown, an intercept operator there, still remembers straining to hear every sound. "You're trying to pull out just the slightest thing you can hear. And sometimes it's very, very weak so you put these things directly over your ear and turn the volume up as high as you can get it." 

Inside the listening post's operations building, intercept operators would work "cases," as the larger Soviet ships—cruisers and battleships—were known. Once a Russian signal was captured, the intercept operator would type out the five-letter code groups on a typewriter with Cyrillic keys. "Every operator there had an assignment and they had a particular frequency they were listening to ... ," Brown said. "Each operator there had a particular case they were listening to. And in Bremerhaven it was all Soviet and East German and Polish— mostly Russian—communicating with their homeport." 

Not only did each person have his own case to work, but also three or four intercept operators were assigned to search positions. "What they did was sit there and continuously go through frequency after frequency, just scanned the entire spectrum listening and copying it and looking it up in books and seeing what it was," said Brown. "Because at times there were frequency changes and you could catch them early if you had this kind of scanning going on. Or sometimes there were things that went on that no one knew about and you would find them. So the best operators in the group generally manned the search positions." 

To monitor East German naval activity in the Baltic Sea, a listening post was built in the tiny village of Todendorf, a name that roughly translates to "Village of Death." Located near the northern city of Kiel, a port on the Baltic, the fog-shrouded base was home to about 150 naval intercept operators. There the "Merry Men of Todendorf," as they called themselves, lived in a barracks warmed by a coal-fired stove and dined on schnitzel sandwiches and three-egg Bauernfruhstücke. 

To better monitor the Communists, the technicians frequently drove mobile intercept vans and trucks to a remote stretch of Fehmarn Island in the Baltic Sea. There, under difficult conditions, they would set up their temporary listening post. "One would have had to experience manhandling a bulky antenna system to the top of a two-and-a-half-ton van in freezing rain," said one of the Merry Men. "And enduring days . . . spent warming hash, soup, or canned spaghetti on a hot plate and trying to cook eggs in a coffee pot, napping in a sleeping bag inside the freezing cab of the van. Or accompanying a five-ton equipment truck while listening to the never ending roar of the portable generator, and suffering the indignities of life without a restroom. Fresh water was limited to what could be carried in jerry cans, the nearest toilet was ten miles away, and showers were out of the question until the mission was terminated and they returned to Todendorf." Later, another small listening post, made up of vans the size of semitrailer trucks, was established at Dahme on the German Riviera. One telemetry intercept operator described Dahme as "a target-rich environment."

Other listening posts in West Germany snuggled close to Soviet bloc land borders or hung on the edge of steep cliffs.

Following massive Warsaw Pact maneuvers in an area of Czechoslovakia that NATO considered a major invasion corridor, the Army Security Agency quickly established a monitoring base on a nearby West German mountain. Long white vans packed with sensitive eavesdropping, recording, and transcribing equipment were airlifted 3,500 feet up to Eckstein, a peak on Hoher Bogen mountain in the Bavarian forest. Elint towers, odd-shaped antennas secured in cement, warning signs, and radomes that looked like giant Ping-Pong balls were erected. "At night, one could see the lights of Pilsen and Prague," recalled F. Harrison Wallace, Jr., a former Sigint specialist assigned to Eckstein. "Eckstein was chosen because there was a clear view eastward from the top of the cliff—twelve hundred feet straight down." Eventually the site began to look like a parking lot for eavesdropping vans. Eckstein was home to about a hundred personnel, including Russian and Czech linguists and a dozen traffic analysts. 

For those assigned to such remote border listening posts, life could be very rough. Seventy-mile-per-hour blizzard winds tore at Eckstein's small trailers and Quonset hut and buried them in snow up to eight feet. "There was no running water on the mountain," said Wallace. "Water for coffee, hot chocolate, and washing had to be carried to 'the Hill' in five gallon Jerry cans." Sanitation consisted of a single, two-hole wooden outhouse, covered with heavy icicles in the winter, that simply sent the waste down the side of the cliff. 

Despite the isolation of Eckstein, there were moments of excitement. "The finest hour for Eckstein," said Wallace, "was the 'Prague Spring' of 1968," when the Soviet army brutally invaded Czechoslovakia to crush a budding rebellion. Eckstein was able to provide NSA with minute-by minute details of the invasion. The remote listening post also played a key role in eavesdropping on Soviet involvement in the Israeli-Egyptian Yom Kippur War of 1973. Communications intercepted at Eckstein indicated that the Russians were planning to consolidate Warsaw Pact supplies in Prague before airlifting them to Egypt. 

Another rich source of Soviet bloc communications was overflights of East Germany. To facilitate the transportation of personnel and supplies to West Berlin, which sat like an island in a Soviet sea, negotiators had agreed on three narrow air corridors connecting it with West Germany. For NSA, these air corridors became veins of gold. The twenty-mile-wide paths together covered about one-sixth of East Germany. Masquerading as routine cargo flights through the corridors, U.S. Air Force C-130E and C-97G aircraft packed with eavesdropping gear would secretly monitor Communist bloc communications as they flew over the corridors.
 

These missions were conducted by the secretive 7405 Support Squadron which was located at Wiesbaden Air Base in West Germany. Operating under code names such as Creek Rose, Creek Stone, and Creek Flea, the squadron flew 213 signals intelligence missions during the first half of 1967, clocking more than 915 hours in the air and snaring 5,131 intercepts. On their slow transits to and from West Berlin, the "backenders" operated a variety of receivers, recorders, signal analyzers, and direction finders. Specialized NSA equipment, a part of Project Musketeer Foxtrot, was also installed. The goal was to pinpoint hostile radar systems and dissect their electronic pulses so that, in the event of war, American fighters and bombers would be able to avoid, jam, or spoof anti-aircraft weapons.

With the ability to look deep into East German territory, intercept operators picked up enormous amounts of intelligence on the Russian systems. NSA's Project Musketeer Foxtrot, said one intelligence report, "provided precise measurements of the Tall King radars. Numerous intercepts of 'unusual' Tall King modes during this project indicated more sophisticated operation than previously suspected." Other intercepts revealed the parameters of Soviet Fan Song radars, used to guide surface-to-air missiles, and the exact location of a new Fire Can radar associated with Russian 57- and 85-millimeter anti-aircraft cannons. In June 1967, as Israel launched the Six-Day War, the Ravens were able to detect East German missile equipment being moved close to the West German border. 

Turkey also became prime real estate for NSA, especially because of its proximity to Soviet missile testing areas. In 1957, a listening post was built near the village of Karamürsel on the Sea of Marmara, about thirty seven miles southeast of Istanbul. Eventually, a giant elephant-cage antenna dominated the horizon. In the outdoor cafes nearby, Turkish farmers sipped çay from glass cups and inhaled bitter smoke from water pipes and the local Yeni Harmen cigarettes.

At 9:07 A.M., on April 12, 1961, activity inside the listening post grew frenzied. At that moment, far to the north, a giant Vostok 1 rocket rose from its launch pad. Sitting within the massive spacecraft was Colonel Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, twenty-seven, the son of a peasant family from the rural village of Klushino near Smolensk, and now dubbed by his fellow cosmonauts the Columbus of the Cosmos. For the first time in history, a person was being sent into space. But the Soviet government, out of fear of a mishap or disaster, kept the liftoff enormously secret. Only after Gagarin had returned safely was an announcement made. 

Despite the secrecy, however, intercept operators at Karamürsel were able to monitor the liftoff and flight moment by moment, including the conversations between Gagarin and mission control. 

"We couldn't listen [directly] to the spacecraft because it was encrypted—the back-and-forth between [it and] the space station," said a former intercept operator at Karamürsel. "But by satellite we would be able to eavesdrop on their [Russian] local, unencrypted lines within the space center and over those lines we could hear the conversations with the cosmonauts because they would have an open speaker in the background. They would be using a frequency that no one else was and we were able to just lock in on that." 

Among the very few Westerners to have listened to the world's first manned space mission as it was happening was Karamürsel intercept operator Jack Wood. "Our mission," he said, "was the number one mission in the world—to monitor the Russian manned space program. After nearly forty years, I still remember the excitement of hearing Yuri Gagarin's voice over my headset. . . . We were all tuned in for that historic moment. Loose translation: 'I see you and hear you well, OK.' " 

The flight nearly ended in tragedy, however. As the spacecraft was about to reenter earth's atmosphere, two parts of the vehicle failed to separate as planned and the capsule began spinning out of control. "Malfunction!!!" Colonel Yevgeny Karpov, Gagarin's commander, scribbled angrily in his notes at the space center. Karpov saw disaster. "Don't panic! Emergency situation." But after ten minutes the parts broke away, the spacecraft steadied, and the landing was successful. 

⚒☠⚒☠⚒☠

In Japan, the dust from World War II Allied bombing attacks had barely settled when American eavesdroppers began setting up shop. In charge of finding an ideal location to eavesdrop on Russia, China, and North Korea was Navy Captain Wesley Wright, a pioneer cryptologist, who was based in Tokyo as chief of NSA Pacific. Wright remembered the tunnels at Corregidor in the Philippines and had heard of similar tunnels in a place called Kamiseya, an area of rice paddies in the shadow of Mount Fuji. The tunnels were used to store torpedoes for air attacks against American ships. Wright decided that the tunnels could now be turned against the Communists as a secret listening post. The low ambient electrical noise in the rural area made for good reception. 

At the time, the tunnels of Kamiseya were a mess. The floors were covered in three inches of water, and the rusty overhead rails used for moving torpedoes were still in place. Gradually the tunnels were made livable, lighting was installed, SP-600 high-frequency receivers were brought in, guards were assigned, other buildings were built or restored. Dozens of rhombic antennas, arranged in rosette patterns, were constructed to sweep in the Communist communications. A rotating switch allowed the intercept operators to choose the antenna that best received their target. Along the walls of the tunnel were columns of metal racks with thick black cables snaking from the receivers. Soon, long ribbons of seven-ply fan-fold carbon paper, covered with rows of Russian words and code groups, were flowing from Underwood typewriters twenty-four hours a day. More intercept positions were built in an adjacent building. Known as the pantry, the windowless room there had cream and green rubber tiles on the floor and globe lights above each "posit."

By 1965, Kamiseya had become the largest Navy listening post in the world, with over a thousand people raking the ether for Soviet and other Communist communications. Some of the intercept operators went on temporary assignment aboard one of the many ships sailing in the waters near the target countries. Others would fly aboard EP-3B ferret aircraft that eavesdropped near the massive Soviet port of Vladivostok and elsewhere. After their sea and airborne missions, the intercept operators would return to Kamiseya with 7 ½ -inch magnetic tapes containing captured signals. Linguists in headsets would then spend hours sifting through the data, listening for nuggets of useful intelligence to be sent to NSA. The base had an extensive library, bursting with foreign-language dictionaries, other books, and magazines. It was also "net control" for the entire Pacific, receiving direction-finding reports from listening posts stretching from California to Okinawa. Kamiseya would then triangulate the exact location of Soviet ships and submarines over millions of square miles of ocean.

Among many other listening posts set up in Japan was one at Misawa Air Base, 400 miles north of Tokyo. It had originally been built by the Japanese with the idea of establishing a northern base from which long range bombers could be launched toward Alaska. The facility was eventually used to train Japanese teams to sabotage Allied aircraft during the final months of the war. But as U.S. forces closed in on Japan, carrier-based Hell Cats raked Misawa's buildings and runways for several days. B-29 raids followed, virtually demolishing the base. Nevertheless, following Japan's surrender the Army Corps of Engineers quickly moved in and turned the former sabotage base into a major listening post for eavesdropping on China and western Russia. 

Also to eavesdrop on China, a listening post was built on the Japanese island of Okinawa, 300 miles east of the Chinese mainland. Constructed near the town of Sobe, Torii Station was home to intercept operators who were attached to the 51st Special Operations Command. Traffic and cryptanalysts worked nearby at the Joint Sobe Processing Center. Among the targets was high-level Chinese army and diplomatic traffic. "Security was hermetic on that post," said David Parks, an Army  intercept operator who was stationed there in the mid-1960s. "Once you left the building never a word passed between you and your comrades about anything that may have happened at work. At work everything was compartmentalized. ... If there was a need for an individual to visit a part of the building that they were not cleared for then an escort would have to be arranged."

Nearby was an expansive antenna farm consisting of three square miles of rhombic antennas, and up a hill was a giant circular elephant cage antenna. The eavesdropping was done at the windowless operations compound where, says Parks, "you would hear the music played twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, to mask any stray radio signal that might escape." Just inside the entrance and off a long hallway were the Morse intercept rooms manned by the various services—each one targeting their Chinese counterpart. 

Sitting in front of a pair of R-390 receivers, the intercept operators would have one tuned to a target, known as the "control." When the control stopped to listen for a response, the intercept operator would search for this other station—called the out-station—with the other receiver. Likewise, each earphone would be connected to separate receivers. To make life difficult, sometimes there were as many as ten out-stations.

Some targets would be assigned, while at other times the intercept operator would twist knobs searching for new targets. Prize targets included coded Chinese messages—streams of numbers in groups of four. Once these were located, the intercept operator would type them out on six-ply carbon paper. A room supervisor would eavesdrop on the eavesdroppers to make sure they were not just copying the loud, easy signals, known as ducks. "If the room supervisor thought you were just padding your time by copying ducks," said Parks, "he would call you on the intercom and say something like, 'Get off of that duck, Parks, and back on the knobs.' "

At the time, the sounds of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, ripping apart Chinese society, echoed through the listeners' earphones. "It was reflected in the stuff we copied every day," said one intercept operator. "For instance, they sent quotations of Chairman Mao back and forth as a kind of oneupsmanship. They would  get on the net and they would all have their Little Red Books. And they would send a page and a paragraph number and a quote within that to another operator and then everybody would jump back and say, Well, here, read this one and I'm a better commie than you are." Like the Red Guards, the intercept operators had a copy of Mao's Little Red Book close at hand. 

"They're humans too," said the intercept operator, "and that humanness comes through. You learn these people as you work the job because it is the same people day in and day out and you learn their quirks and their tempers and everything about them. You know their 'fist' and the sound of their transmitter. You can tell if they've changed a tube in that transmitter after a while. 

"They knew full well that we were copying them," said Parks, "and tried to throw us off of the scent all the time. They had their bag of tricks and we had ours. A typical search would have me incrementally turning the knob and listening to each and every Morse station I came across. The airwaves were full of signals of all types, voice transmissions, Morse, teletype, beacons, fax transmitters sending photo images for the newspapers and wire services. There was indeed a seeming 3-D soundscape to the radio medium. We used such terms as 'up' or 'down' and 'under' in describing where a target might be in relation to a signal. There were known islands of sound imbedded at fixed points in the soundscape. It was not unusual for one op to say to another, 'Your outstation (target) is underneath that RCA teletype at 3.5 megs [megahertz]. I would know just where he meant."

Among the most difficult traffic to copy were coded diplomatic communications. "Diplomatic traffic was the top of the heap," said Parks. "The analysts wanted that copied as clean as possible; if you couldn't do that, you were off the job." Parks once intercepted an unknown embassy employee "who was transmitting, in English, a blow-by-blow description of the embassy being invaded and the door to his code room being chopped down by a rioting crowd. Frantic little guy, lost his mind and maybe his life. I've always wondered what happened to him. I also wonder if the 'riot' had a purpose other than frustration. On my end I was sweating bullets as there was brass standing two deep around my intercept position urging me to get it all. Every page of six-ply that came off my mill was immediately ripped off and handed around. The embassy op finally went 'nil more heard.' "

Air Force intercept operators also worked on Okinawa, eavesdropping on Chinese air communications. One of their most important tasks was to listen closely as American signals intelligence planes flew eavesdropping missions near the coast of mainland China, occasionally penetrating the country. Twice daily, missions would be launched from either Taipei, at the north end of the island, or Tainan, at the southern end. One of the Mandarin Chinese intercept operators who followed those flights from Torii Station was Robert Wheatley. "Along the way, our ground stations would listen in on the Chicom [Chinese Communist] fighter squadrons as they'd scramble and rise up to meet the recon planes," he said. "It was almost like a game of cat and mouse to the pilots involved. When our planes would come over a given fighter squadron's sphere of coverage, the MiGs would scramble and follow along below until the next squadron up the coast would scramble and take over the chase. But the ceiling of the Russian-made MiG 21 was far below that of our reconnaissance planes, and generally speaking, the MiGs were no real threat to them." 

But occasionally one of the MiGs would get lucky. Wheatley recalls once receiving a Flash message from a listening post in Taiwan. "It detailed the shootdown of one of our airborne reconnaissance platforms by a Chinese MiG-21 over the China mainland," he said. "The MiG pilot had made a 'zoom climb' to the highest altitude he could make. At the moment he topped out, he released his air-to-air rockets. The linguist listening in on the fighter pilot reported what he'd heard him say. Translation: 'Climbing to twenty thousand [meters] . . . Rockets fired! I fixed his ass! I fixed his ass!' The meaning of that was dismayingly clear. The 'game' had become deadly serious! The account of what had happened was instantly passed to us on Okinawa via encrypted Teletype transmission. We were instructed to listen for any references to the shootdown by any of the Chinese ground stations that we listened in on." 

As word of the shootdown got around, said Wheatley, "the mood in the radio ops room took on the air of a funeral. I would liken it to the moment that America learned of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Some of those on board that plane were guys with whom we'd attended language school. And all were fellow airmen—brothers—whether we knew them or not. Were it not for the luck of the draw, any one of us could have been aboard that flight. Everyone in the room was stunned, silent, and ashen-faced. We never did find out if there were any survivors among the crew of the aircraft. I suspect not. But we never heard any more on the matter, for we did not have the 'need to know.' " 

Picking just the right spot for the secret bases was as much a matter of intuition as of science. In trying to "locate intercept stations," said former NSA research chief Dr. Howard Campaigne, "it's well to know which would be the best places. They were often surprises. Intercept stations were not effective when they thought they would be, and vice versa." Sometimes the best place to listen to a target was on the exact opposite point on earth—the antipodal spot. "One of the things we worked at was antipodal reception," said Campaigne. "When a radio station sends out waves, the ionosphere keeps [them] in like a whispering gallery and [they're] concentrated at the antipodes and we were able to demonstrate such reception. Unfortunately, the earth is so clustered that the end of every diameter has got water in at least one half of the places. So there aren't very many places that are any good." 

One spot where "hearability" was near perfect was the rugged, windswept desert of Eritrea in East Africa. Reputed to be the hottest place on earth, it is a land of geographic extremes, where gray mountains suddenly rise like fortress walls from broad rocky grasslands, and oceans of sparsely vegetated lowlands marry vast seas of sand. On April 30,1943, in the middle of World War II, U.S. Army Second Lieutenant Clay Littleton landed there while searching for a good location for a radio station in North Africa. Tests showed that Eritrea, just north of the equator and with an altitude of 7,600 feet, was practically an audio funnel, and an intercept station was quickly set up, as was a large relay facility. Operational spaces, containing ten-inch-thick bombproof concrete walls, were built underground, near the capital of Asmara. 

In the early 1960s a conga line of trucks, straining against the heat and blowing sand, hauled 6,000 tons of heavy steel to the secret base. By then Eritrea had become federated with Ethiopia. Planned for Kagnew Station, whose name comes from the Ethiopian word meaning to bring order out of chaos, was a pair of massive satellite dishes to capture Soviet signals bouncing off the moon, and others relayed from earth orbiting satellites. One was to be a dish 85 feet in diameter and the other was to be possibly the largest movable object ever built—a massive bowl 150 feet wide sitting on top of a rotating pedestal capable of tracking the arc of the moon. When built, it would rise from the desert like a great chalice, an offering to the gods.

A few years earlier, Kagnew Station had been the scene of perhaps NSA's first and only strike. Arthur Adolphsen arrived at the listening post straight from snowbound Germany in January 1957 wearing a hot Ike jacket. A year later he and the other intercept operators moved into a new operations building. The move, however, brought with it numerous new regulations and restrictions on personal activity throughout the base. "The Operations Center . . . went on strike some time after we moved on the new base [December 1957]," said Adolphsen. "It lasted for about four days; no one could hear any signals. 

"After three or four days of not much traffic being sent to Washington a planeload of NSA people showed up and wanted to know what was going on. We had a meeting of all operations personnel in the gym and they asked us what we wanted, and there were many that were brave enough to stand up and let them know. It was brought on by the post command removing stripes and privileges for very minor infractions. They would not let us have autos and motorbikes, restricted everyone to base, and so forth. To my knowledge no personnel got punished, but the entire post command, right down to the chaplain, got replaced."

By 1967 Ethiopia was attempting to turn Eritrea from a largely independent partner in federation into simply another province, and a rebel movement developed within Eritrea to fight the Ethiopian government. The tension was felt acutely at NSA, which feared that an Eritrean coup might jeopardize its listening post. The agency therefore sought to eavesdrop both on the Ethiopian government and on the rebels. However, it had long been a rule at NSA that the agency would not eavesdrop on the host country from within the host country. And because a number of Ethiopians worked close to some of the operations at Kagnew Station, it was felt that any attempt to eavesdrop from within would quickly leak out. In such an event the entire mission could be forced out of the country. So NSA turned to its British counterpart, the GCHQ, to do the listening. 

At the time the closest GCHQ listening post was in the British colony of Aden (now part of Yemen) across the Red Sea. The British were having problems of their own. With only a few months to go before they pulled out of the colony, a civil war had developed over which local political faction would take over control of the new nation. Ordinarily NSA would have done the eavesdropping from the U.S. embassy in Aden but it was feared that the U.S. embassy might be forced out, especially if the new government was Marxist, as it turned out to be. The British, however, would be allowed to remain, if only to clear up administrative issues. Thus it was decided to eavesdrop on the Ethiopian government from the British High Commission office in Aden, which on independence would become an embassy. 

After a crash course at Bletchley Park, three GCHQ intercept operators were sent to Aden for the operation. The listening post was set up in a secure room in the building, the operators hidden under the cover of communications specialists, and the antennas disguised as flagpoles. "The priority tasks from the NSA were of course the Ethiopian military, from which a coup could be expected," said Jock Kane, one of the intercept operators. Tensions in Ethiopia continued to mount and it was finally decided to pull out of the country entirely. The enormous antennas were dismantled and the intercept operators sent back to NSA a decade later, in 1977. 

The wide oceans also needed to be covered in order to eavesdrop on Russian ships, and submarines as they came up briefly to transmit their rapid "burst" messages. Sitting almost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, between Africa and Brazil, is a speck of rock named Ascension Island. Formed by successive volcanic eruptions, the lonely dot rises steeply from the blue-black waves like a massive aircraft carrier anchored to the seabed. Dense vegetation is interspersed with harsh fields of volcanic rock that locals call "hell with the fires turned off." Nevertheless, the British island is ideally suited to eavesdrop on millions of square miles of ocean. Thus, the Central Signals Organization, the overseas branch of GCHQ, found it an ideal location for a major high frequency and satellite listening post. 

In the northern Pacific, it would have been difficult to find a more isolated spot for a listening post than Midway Island, a coral atoll about halfway between California and Japan. Lost in the great ocean, Midway consists of two islands: Sand Island, which is three miles square and has a landing strip, and Eastern Island, a speck of sand less than a mile square, where the listening post was built. "I looked and looked and could only see the white crests of the waves below us on the Pacific Ocean," said Phillip Yasson, a Navy intercept operator, of his first flight to the island. "As the plane got lower and lower in altitude, I had this feeling of landing on the water because that was the only thing visible." The men assigned to the listening post were quartered in an old movie theater that had been bombed during World War II. "You could stand in the middle of the island," said Yasson, "make a 360-degree turn, and still see the ocean except for where the buildings blocked the view." 

In the operations building, the intercept operators eavesdropped on Soviet ships and submarines and attempted to pinpoint them with a high-frequency direction finder. Midway was too small for a giant elephant-cage antenna, so instead they used vertical wires. Nevertheless, reception was very good. "Surrounded by water, it was a good choice," said Yasson. "There were plenty of signals." During the midnight shift, one of the intercept operators would divide his time between eavesdropping on the Russians and washing the clothes for the others on the watch. The principal hobby of the eighteen people on the island was collecting the colorful glass orbs that occasionally washed up—floats from old Japanese fishing nets. Swimming was hazardous because of sharks. For company the intercept operators had gooney birds—lots of gooney birds. One survey put their numbers at more than two hundred thousand. The stately black and white birds—black-footed albatrosses— with seven-foot wingspreads glide gracefully to earth but then frequently have trouble with their landing gear, tumbling headfirst into the sand. 

The vast Indian Ocean, which stretches from the coastline of East Africa to islands of East Asia and the shores of Australia, presented a particularly formidable problem. The solution involved the dislocation of an entire native population, the taking over of a British colony, and the creation of one of the most forbidding territories on earth. 

In the early 1960s, the British government began taking an unusual interest in a sparse, remote group of islands located nearly in the center of the Indian Ocean. Known as the Chagos Archipelago, it was an almost forgotten dependency of Mauritius, one of Britain's larger island colonies, which lay 1,200 miles to the south. As the Mauritius islanders began to agitate for independence, Britain inexplicably offered them freedom, plus £3 million, if they would give up their claim to the scruffy, distant sandbars and atolls of the Chagos. The Mauritius government accepted. Later, away from the glare of publicity, London made a brief, quiet announcement. At a time when it was freeing its distant lands from the bonds of colonialism, Britain was suddenly creating a new colony. The tiny Chagos Archipelago, a collection of dots lost in millions of square miles of ocean, would become the British Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT. 

With the ink barely dry on the paperwork, Britain turned around and just as quietly handed the colony over to the United States, gratis, for fifty years. The purpose was the building of an unidentified "defence installation." There was no debate in Parliament and virtually no publicity. 

Because of the U.S. government's need for secrecy, between 1965 and 1973 the entire native population of some 2,000 had to be evicted from the islands, where they and their relatives had lived quietly for hundreds of years. A visitor in the late 1950s, before the islands became an "American colony," reported, "There was a chateau . . . whitewashed stores, factories and workshops, shingled and thatched cottages clustered around the green . . . and parked motor launches." According to one of the islanders, "We were assembled in front of the island because the Americans were coming for good. We didn't want to go. We were born there. So were our fathers and forefathers who were buried in that land." 

Although the islanders were all British subjects, they were removed bodily and dispersed once NSA prepared to move in. "They were to be given no protection, and no assistance, by the Earl, the Crown, or anybody else," wrote one outraged British writer, Simon Winchester: 

Instead the British Government, obeying with craven servility the wishes of the Pentagon—by now the formal lessees of the island group—physically removed every man, woman and child from the islands, and placed them, bewildered and frightened, on the islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles. British officials did not consult the islanders. They did not tell them what was happening to them. They did not tell anyone else what they planned to do. They just went right ahead and uprooted an entire community, ordered people from their jobs and their homes, crammed them on to ships, and sailed them away to a new life in a new and foreign country. They trampled on two centuries of community and two centuries of history, and dumped the detritus into prison cells and on to quaysides in Victoria [Seychelles] and Port Louis [Mauritius], and proceeded, with all the arrogant attitudes that seemed peculiar to this Imperial rump, promptly to forget all about them. 

In the spring of 1973, a group of NSA officials and fourteen intercept operators and analysts from the three military cryptologic organizations arrived on the largest island of the group, Diego Garcia, to begin hearability tests. Named after the Portuguese sailor who discovered it four hundred years earlier, the island is a thin, horseshoe-shaped atoll, thirty-seven miles from tip to tip, that barely rises above the rolling waves. The NSA team, codenamed Jibstay, set up a series of intercept antennas, including a small elephant cage known as a "pusher." Also, NSA shipped a portable eavesdropping van to the island. It was not long before the Soviets began snooping around to see what NSA was up to. "A Soviet trawler maintained station just off the receiver site," said Monty Rich, a member of the Jibstay team. "The trawler was relieved for a short time by a Soviet Navy Sverdlov-class cruiser."

Gregor McAdam was one of the first Navy Seabees on Diego Garcia and helped construct some of the early buildings. "All we had was seahuts to live in," he said. "And lots of donkeys, chickens, flies up the ass, and Double Diamond beer. Once every couple of weeks a shipment of beer would come in, but if you didn't get right over to the club (a Quonset hut) and snap up some cases, you're S.O.L. and stuck with the Double Diamond or Pabst Blue Ribbon." Even in those early days, he said, the Russians took a great interest in the construction. "We had a radio station that used to play 'Back in the USSR' for the Russian trawler that was always offshore."

On Diego Garcia, cryptologic technicians nicknamed "wizards" worked in the windowless Ocean Surveillance Building located at "C Site." There, as part of a worldwide Advanced Tactical Ocean Surveillance System, codenamed Classic Wizard, they served as the Indian Ocean downlink for the highly secret White Cloud satellite program. This consists of constellations of signals intelligence satellites that are able to pinpoint and eavesdrop on ships and submarines across the vast oceans. Others, in the High Frequency Direction Finding Division, monitored the airwaves for thousands of miles in all directions for any indications of Soviet sea activity. 

One wizard, who spent two tours on Diego Garcia, was Steven J. Forsberg, a Navy cryptologic technician. Despite the isolation and remoteness of the base, he said, the ocean surveillance compound was also closely guarded by a detachment of U.S. Marines. "On those few occasions when they could stay awake at night guarding our site," he said, "which had never been, and never would be, attacked, they often played 'quick draw' with their loaded .45s. Well, one night some guy accidentally squeezed the trigger while doing so." To cover himself the Marine reported that the shot came from a sniper. As a result the Marines went to full alert. "Security was driving around in a truck with a loud horn telling people to go inside," he said. Other Marines "lined up on the roof in full gear and with loaded weapons. If you came near the barracks, a guy would scream, 'Lock and load!' and you'd hear all those M-16 bolts slamming. Then they'd yell, 'Turn around and walk away! Deadly force authorized!' "  

So highly protected is Diego Garcia that even when a small private sailboat, crossing the Indian Ocean, pulled close to shore asking to resupply water and do some emergency repairs, it was ordered to keep away from the island. Eventually the boat was allowed to remain offshore until daybreak, but a spotlight was constantly trained on it. Then as soon as the morning came, patrol boats forced the sailboat back out onto the deep ocean. Under the terms of the 1966 agreement between Britain and the United States, no one without formal orders to the area was permitted entry to any of the islands.

By 1989 the Naval Security Group had personnel serving at forty eight listening posts around the world, with 15 percent conducting operations at sea aboard ninety ships.

To avoid the problem of over dependence on British intercepts, which partly led to the surprise at Suez, NSA began expanding its presence on Cyprus, ideally positioned in the eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, it began training its antennas on the Middle East rather than exclusively on the Soviet Bloc. To the north, east, and west of Nicosia, Cyprus's capital, listening posts were set up. At Karavas, about fifty Soviet and Slavic linguists eavesdropped on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Other monitoring stations were set up in Mia Milea, in Yerolakkos, and near Troodos Mountain. On the south coast, at Akrotiri, intercept operators listened for indications of war in the Middle East, while also eavesdropping on peace negotiations. In Nicosia, signals intelligence personnel were based in the embassy to relay back to NSA intercepted diplomatic cables. During the 1990 Gulf War, the listening posts played a key role and also spearheaded the hunt for the hostages in Lebanon. 

By far the most difficult—and at the same time most important— body of water in which to spy was the Barents Sea. Like an ice pack on Russia's forehead, the half-million square miles of dark, unforgiving, polar-cold water held some of Russia's deepest secrets. It was a frozen world of white, gray, and black where the blunt hulls of onyx-colored submarines began and ended their long patrols in search of American subs under the Atlantic Ocean. It was also where new missiles were tested and glacier-shaking nuclear weapons were detonated. The thin winter ice allowed the Russian Northern Fleet to conduct exercises year round, and the sky above was like a mechanical aviary for the Soviet Air Force. The air was electric with signals. The problem for NSA was how to get an antenna and tape recorder into one of the most secret and heavily protected areas on earth. 

Black and moonless, the late night was an odd time to start painting. In the dim reddish glow from a low-observation flashlight, George A. Cassidy began applying thick coats of steel-gray paint to the submarine's tall sail. It was mid-September 1965 and the frigid spray from the North Sea deposited a dew like film on the sailor's dark pea coat. In an hour the giant "SS-352," identifying the sub as American, had been painted over on both sides of the tower. The USS Halfbeak's covert mission had begun. 

A month before, late at night on August 17, Cassidy had reported to a basement office in NSA's Operations Building for a Top Secret codeword briefing on his new assignment. "One of our missions," recalled the former Elint intercept operator, "was to bring back any rocket telemetry that we could get." At the time, the White House was very concerned about advances in Soviet ballistic missile capabilities. An over-the-pole attack launched from one of the ICBM bases close to the Barents Sea was the most likely scenario for World War III. U.S. Sigint aircraft would occasionally fly into the area in an attempt to collect signals, but their presence was immediately obvious and sensitive activities would be halted until it departed. The only way to capture the telemetry—key signals revealing the operational performance of the missile that were transmitted back to its control center—was by stealth. A submarine would have to penetrate deep into Soviet territorial waters in perhaps the most dangerous sea on the planet.  

To hide the true nature of their mission, even from the crew, Cassidy and the three other intercept operators were given "radiomen" patches for their uniforms. Their orders never even mentioned the name of the ship they were being assigned to. It simply used the words "U.S.S. Classified." The U.S.S. Classified turned out to be a twenty-year-old diesel submarine named the USS Halfbeak, which was berthed at the naval base in New London, Connecticut. Although outwardly like any other sub, eavesdropping antennas had been attached to the Halfbeak's electronic countermeasures (ECM) mast, and a special receiver had been installed in the periscope well beneath the conning tower. 

The intercept operators, not being part of the regular crew, were squeezed in wherever there was space. "I lived in the forward torpedo room, among eighteen torpedoes and six torpedo tubes," said Cassidy. His bed was a piece of plywood sandwiched between Mark 24 wire-guided torpedoes—each with 500 pounds of explosives packed into its warhead. Nearby were two Mark 45 nuclear-tipped torpedoes with tags labeled "War Shot." 

It was late September when the Halfbeak finally reached its operational area off Russia's Kola Peninsula. Inside the crowded metal tube, life was cold, dirty, and quiet. To ensure radio silence, tubes had been removed from the communications equipment and locked in a safe. Adding to the discomfort, one of two stills that converted salt water into freshwater had broken down. Thus, each man was given a large tomato soup can to fill with water once a day for washing. Then about half the heaters quit. "I remember lying in my bunk scraping the frost off the torpedo above me," recalled Cassidy. 

Despite the problems, the mission went on. Beneath the black, crawling waves the Halfbeak slowly maneuvered toward its target, a heavily protected island off the Russian coast where much of the Soviet missile testing was taking place. During the day, the sub operated on battery power, cruising quietly at periscope depth sixty-two feet below the surface. Once the passive sonar indicated that no surface contacts were above, the mast with the Sigint equipment would be raised about six feet above the waves. 

"If it was daylight, we would be running fairly slow so it wouldn't make a wake," said Cassidy, "because if you went over four knots underwater, this would start throwing up a plume." At night the diesel engine would be fired up and the snorkel mast would be raised to provide fresh air to the crew and to charge the batteries. Ever closer the sub approached—well past the twelve-mile territorial limit and just a few miles off the beach. Through the periscope, the men could see beefy Russian women hanging out laundry.

Down in the makeshift Sigint spaces, behind a closed door in the control room, the intercept operators listened like electronic birdwatchers for telltale sounds. They attempted to separate the important signals—the wobbling, squeaking, chirping sounds that reveal key radar and telemetry systems—from a cacophony of static. "We used to practice all the time listening to tapes of different Soviet radar," said Cassidy. "So if we heard it, we could tell what it was. Before we would go on a mission, we would train ourselves by sitting in front of these tapes that operators had made while out on patrol." At the same time, they measured and photographed the squiggly electronic waves that rippled across the orange screens of the Elint receivers.

"We had special equipment that was made up of eight to twelve little receivers that would each receive a frequency that the Soviets transmitted telemetry on," recalled Cassidy. "On this run the main interest was the telemetry. But any Russian signal you were able to tape was good because all this went into a database. . . . And this would all be piped into a recorder, so whenever we heard telemetry coming from the island, we would start to record it. The rockets could be anything from satellite launches to missiles. We heard a lot of fire control radar along with it. We had capabilities of intercepting twelve to fourteen channels." To capture Soviet voice communications, one of the intercept operators was a Russian linguist. 

The greatest worry was discovery. Thus, great care was taken to watch and listen for any approaching Soviet aircraft, ship, or submarine. 

Crew

For weeks all went well despite the Halfbeak's risky location. But early on a dark morning in late October, Cassidy heard the distinctive whistle of a "mushroom" radar, indicating that somewhere overhead was an  approaching Soviet TU-95 Bear—a large and deadly strategic bomber with swept wings and four huge turboprop engines. At almost the same moment, he also picked up the signal of a Russian destroyer bearing down on the Halfbeak's location. "I have contact!" Cassidy yelled to the captain. "Very weak TU-95 aircraft mushroom radar and a Soviet surface ship." 

The troubles only got worse. "And then I heard this whish," Cassidy recalled, "and I knew it was a flat-spin radar from a Soviet "Foxtrot"- or "Whiskey"-class submarine. After I told the captain, we pulled all the antennas and masts down. This was at night—early in the morning. We were snorkeling, which means we had the diesel engines running. We went to Battery Operation and then to Battle Stations Torpedo. We pulled the plug—it went down. We knew we had in the air at least one Soviet aircraft. We knew we had at least one Soviet destroyer and very possibly a Soviet conventional submarine out there." 

The captain took the Halfbeak deep—about three hundred feet— and managed to hide under a dense layer of salt water that deflected any enemy sonar signals. Sailing at four knots, the boat headed south out of harm's way. By afternoon, with the danger apparently over, the Halfbeak headed back toward its operational area near the missile-testing island, arriving early the next morning. But now there was a new problem: through the periscope, as it was rising toward the surface, the captain noticed something strange. Everywhere he looked, all he could see were thick logs floating above. Sigint was out of the question. "We couldn't really put the ECM mast up in that stuff because it had these little thin antennas sticking out, and if you hit that with a log . . . it's going to ruin the watertight integrity of the antenna," recalled Cassidy. He suspected that the Russians had dumped the wood deliberately in order to hinder the sub's spying.

Determined to continue the mission, the captain sailed the Half-beak to another part of the island's coastline and raised the camouflaged ECM mast containing the eavesdropping antennas. By then, however, the Russians were aggressively searching for the intruder and once again, late in the afternoon, Cassidy heard the ominous sounds. This time it was two Soviet destroyers and the signal was Strength Five—the highest, meaning the destroyers were almost on top of them. "I have two Strength Five Russian waterborne platform emissions!" Cassidy yelled to the captain. Then sonar reported the presence of another sub nearby. The captain immediately ordered a dive and set Battle Stations Torpedo. Through a small side tube, a number of white, four-inch pills were fired into the water. Like giant Alka-Seltzer tablets, they were designed to create clouds of bubbles to hide the escaping sub. "We must have fired twenty of those," recalled Cassidy. "We used that and prayed." 

In the control room Cassidy could clearly see the depth gauge about   four feet away. It had a red mark at 350 feet, indicating the test depth— the safety limit for the sub. To his horror, the needle slipped past the mark and continued downward as the old boat began to squeak and groan. "Are we supposed to go below 350 feet?" he yelled to the sailor at the controls. 

"We do whatever the old man says," the man yelled back. 

"Oh God," Cassidy suddenly yelled. "We're sinking. The water's coming in!" Above him he heard a "pop" and ice-cold water poured down on his head. Luckily it was only the snorkel drain breaking, releasing about five gallons of water that had accumulated in the tube. 

As the sub continued to descend to about 400 feet, a short distance from the muddy seafloor, the sonar men could hear pinging sounds from the Soviet ships searching for them above. Next the captain ordered Sedge Quiet. "This is where you basically shut off everything except for the gyroscope and the electric motor that's turning the shaft," said Cassidy. "Lights were reduced, heating was off, the galley ranges were off, hydraulics were off." With the hydraulic system inoperative, it took two sailors to steer the sub, using small handles that pop out of the wheel. 

Hour after hour after hour the Halfbeak quietly maneuvered deep in the Barents Sea as sonar continued to pick up a heavy presence on the surface. At one point a sonar man heard what he thought was an explosion from a depth charge. Crew members were ordered to remove their shoes to keep down the noise. "We were warned about banging anything, coffee cups," said Cassidy. "No noise at all. It was like a tomb in there."

Eventually the oily air began turning thin and rancid. The captain passed the word to break out the carbon dioxide absorbent—cans of powder would be spread on bunks to help draw the deadly gas from the air. Nevertheless, the sub's doctor warned that the oxygen levels were becoming dangerously low. Sailors, including Cassidy, passed out and had to be revived. Two large oxygen canisters were placed in the central part of the sub, and it was suggested that those who felt faint should take a few deep breaths from the masks attached. 

Without electric power, all that the galley could come up with was peanut butter, crackers, and Kool-Aid, but few had the strength to go there anyway. "It was so hard to breathe, you didn't even want to walk from the forward torpedo room to the galley, which was probably about one hundred feet," recalled Cassidy. "Because it was too much effort, you had a hard time breathing. And it was cold; it was damp. They were holding us down. We could not surface because they were above us. Sonar could hear their engines. There were four separate surface contacts around us, plus a probable submarine." 

Finally, after about twelve or thirteen hours, the pinging began to  cease. After another hour, to make sure that the Soviet ships had departed, the Halfbeak slowly began to rise. "He said you know we could probably surface now, but we are going to take another hour and I want you to just search and search and listen, listen, listen," said Cassidy. "And they would put a new operator on about every fifteen or twenty minutes for another good set of ears. When they were positive that there were no surface contacts around, we just squeaked up. I searched all the bands for aircraft . . . and when the captain and the exec [executive officer] were as sure as anybody could be that there were no signals up there, we came up to periscope depth. This was early morning. Looked around with the attack scope and the regular scope and saw nothing. And once they were happy with that, they put up the snorkel mast. . . . The first time we snorkeled after being down so long, the fresh air was so clean and pure it hurt you, it actually hurt your lungs." 

With most of the mission completed and the Soviets hot on their trail, the captain decided to head back to New London. There, the dozens of intercept tapes were double-wrapped and sent by courier to NSA for analysis. As with most missions, the intercept operators were never informed what the agency learned as a result of the dangerous mission. They did not have the required "need to know." And in the ship's history of the USS Halfbeak, the year 1965 has been eliminated.

Throughout the Cold War, similar missions continued. Even as late as 2000, the Barents Sea remained prime eavesdropping territory for American submarines. That summer, the bullet-shaped bow of the USS Memphis, a 6,000-ton attack sub, slipped quietly out of its home port of Groton, Connecticut, and disappeared beneath the frosty whitecaps of the Atlantic. Its target was a major naval exercise by the Russian Northern Fleet—the largest such exercise in a decade. Among the fifty warships and submarines participating in the mock battle was a steel leviathan named the Kursk, a double-hulled, nuclear-powered submarine twice the length of a Boeing 747. On board were about two dozen Granit sea-skimming cruise missiles as well as torpedoes. It was the pride of the nation—the most modern submarine in the Russian Navy. 

On Saturday morning, August 12, the Kursk, with 118 crewmembers aboard, was off the Kola Peninsula cruising at periscope depth, about sixty feet below the sea's heaving swells. Some distance away, maintaining radio silence, the USS Memphis eavesdropped on the maneuvers. Sticking above the surface like the necks of tall, gray giraffes were antenna-covered masts. Down below, intercept operators searched through the static for fire control signals and pilot chatter while sonar men plotted the pinging sounds of other steel fish. Then at precisely 11:28, the sub's sonar sphere—a giant golf ball attached to the bow, containing over 1,000 hydrophones—registered the sound of a short, sharp thud. Two minutes and fifteen seconds later a powerful, fish scattering boom vibrated through the sensitive undersea microphones. The blast was so powerful, the equivalent of up to two tons of TNT, that it was picked up by seismic stations more than 2,000 miles away. 

On the Kursk, a room-size hole opened up in the forward torpedo room, turning the smooth curved bow into a jagged bean can and sending the sub on a deadly dive to the bottom. Sailors who didn't die immediately likely survived only hours. The cause of the disaster was probably the onboard explosion of a missile or torpedo. But given the long cat-and-mouse history of American submarine espionage in the Barents Sea, senior Russian officials pointed the finger at an undersea hit-and-run collision with a U.S. sub. 

Six days later, the Memphis surfaced and quietly sailed into a Norwegian port. There it off-loaded boxes of recording tapes containing an electronic snapshot of the worst submarine disaster in Russia's history—the undersea sounds of the dying Kursk and the surface voices of the confused rescue efforts. The tapes, flown to Washington, largely confirmed the theory that the tragedy was caused by internal explosions. They also confirmed the continuing value of sending eavesdroppers deep into the Barents Sea's perilous waters. 

While many listening posts were quietly built in distant places with tongue-twisting names, others were built much closer to home. On an ancient English estate, an elephant cage rose like a modern-day Stonehenge. Chicksands Priory, in what is today Bedfordshire, dates to the time of William the Conqueror.

Once home to an order of Gilbertine monks and nuns, by World War II Chicksands had become host to a secret Royal Air Force intercept station. In 1948 the U.S. Air Force moved in and began eavesdropping on Soviet communications. By mid-December of the same year Chicksands was intercepting 30,000 five-figure groups of coded traffic a day. Three years later, however, that number had skyrocketed to 200,000 groups a day. 

Communications security operators at Chicksands also began intercepting U.S. Air Force communications. The operation was aimed at analyzing Air Force voice, Morse code, and teletypewriter radio transmissions for violations of security. If they could read the messages or pick up clues to pending operations, it was assumed, so could Soviet eavesdroppers. 

Earl Richardson arrived at Chicksands to join the Security Service in 1953, fresh out of communications school at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. Sitting in front of a Hammarlund Super-Pro SP-600 high frequency receiver mounted in a rack, he would slowly turn the half dozen black dials. His job was to search for sensitive U.S. Air Force messages mistakenly sent in the clear; or identify lazy communicators using made-up voice codes in a poor attempt to mask classified information. The results were put in "Transmission Security Analysis Reports" and sent out to offending commands. There, the radio operator would receive a stern lecture and warning. According to one former Chicksands operator, "Much of the caution was perverse and focused on not being caught again by the Security Service, which in time came to be perceived as an enemy more real than the Warsaw Pact." 

Another elephant cage quietly rose in the Scottish village of Edzell, a farming area nestled in the foothills of the Grampian Hills, thirty-five miles south of Aberdeen. It replaced listening posts in Bremerhaven, Germany, and in Morocco, and soon became host to Army and Air Force eavesdroppers as well. A key target was the shadowy Soviet merchant fleet. 

While NSA concentrated on building its electronic wall around the Communist world, much of the Southern Hemisphere—South America and Africa—escaped close scrutiny. That was one of the key reasons for building a Sigint navy. As the ships slid out of dry dock, they began hauling their antennas and eavesdroppers to places too difficult to reach with land-based listening posts and too remote for regular airborne missions. 

Tired of the daily routine at the listening post in Bremerhaven, Aubrey Brown volunteered for a ship NSA was having converted at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was late on a winter night when he arrived. As he boarded the gray-hulled USS Oxford, the decks were littered with acetylene tanks, welder's torches, and buckets of iron rivets. After sea trials off Norfolk, Virginia, the ship set sail for South America, a continent brimming with signals for its virgin ears, on January 4, 1962. 

At the time, U.S. officials feared that the Communist "fever" that had struck Cuba would spread throughout the continent. Later that month, in Punta del Este, a beach resort in Uruguay, foreign ministers from the Organization of American States were planning to meet to discuss many of these issues. The meeting was seen by the U.S. State Department as an opportunity to push for collective action against Cuba, such as a resolution that all countries still having diplomatic and commercial ties with that nation move to break them. It was thus a logical place for the Oxford's first mission. 

As the Oxford sailed south, intercept operators eavesdropped on one of the assigned targets, government communications links in British Guyana, considered very sensitive because it belonged to our close Sigint partner, England. 

Arriving off Montevideo, on the north shore of the Rio de la Plata estuary, the Oxford was almost unnoticed amid the fleet of cargo ships  heavy with wool, hides, and textiles. On board, hidden below decks, the intercept operators tuned in, listening for telephone calls and messages to and from the delegates attending the conference a few miles east at the resort. 

Afterward, they moved a short distance west, up the Rio de la Plata to Buenos Aires. "We would go into bays to intercept microwave links, and to really intercept that well you had to have your receiving antenna in between their transmitting antenna and their receiving antenna. So to do this we would get into bays," said George A. Cassidy, an Elint specialist who sailed on a later Oxford South American cruise. For microwave communications, which contain a great deal of telephone and other voice communications, the Elint operators used a piece of equipment called the RYCOM, which received the signal and then broke it into hundreds of channels. "We were intercepting South American military voice traffic," said Cassidy. "We would record on magnetic recorders." 

In addition to receivers, a row of nearly a dozen printers constantly pounded out intercepted teletype messages. "If it started printing out five-number code groups, then we knew we had something," said Cassidy. "And if it was Cyrillic, which was really a good find, then we had linguists aboard that could read it. ... If it was a frequency that nobody had noted before, and it was five-number code groups, that was a keeper. . . . We would save those and they would go back to NSA."

Another piece of equipment in the Elint spaces was so secret that it was hidden even from the captain, although not for national security reasons. Forbidden to have a TV on the ship, the intercept crew nevertheless rigged up a small one and attached it to one of the rotating intercept antennas. It was painted gray, and "Special Access" was written on it. "The captain came in for inspection and had no idea what it was," said Cassidy, a veteran of submarine espionage missions on the USS Halfbeak. 

Upon leaving Buenos Aires on its first South American journey, the Oxford headed for another target on its list, a large atomic research station in Argentina's southern Patagonia region. However, according to Aubrey Brown, "the weather conditions were so bad we couldn't get into that position. We tried to do it for days, but we finally had to turn around and come back." 

While off the coast, the intercept operators did pick up information that the president of Argentina had been overthrown. They whipped off a Flash message to NSA, but because of atmospheric conditions, instead of three to five minutes, it took hours to send. "By the time it got there I'm sure it was old news," said Brown. Although the ship had the moonbounce dish, according to Brown it seldom worked. "The moon-bounce mission was more cover story than anything else," he said. "There were only one or two guys that were working on it. We may have used it once or twice. It was mostly cover story." 

On the way north, more than fifty miles offshore, they ran into trouble. "At one point when we were off Argentina," said Brown, "we were pursued by an Argentine warship because we were not flying the flag. ... So they couldn't identify us, didn't know what nationality. It was a relatively old Argentinean naval vessel, but it was a warship. It pursued us because it wanted to know what kind of ship we were. It was very unusual not to have colors. Nothing flying from the mast. So we ran from it. They pursued us but we were monitoring all the traffic to and from the ship, which was all Morse code. We finally outran them." 

Another of the Oxford's missions was to attempt to locate spies in South America who were thought to be communicating by ham radio. "So we set off on this fool's mission to monitor all the ham communications in Latin America for these spies who were communicating with each other on ham radio," said Brown. "And of course there was nothing there." 

Finally the ship pulled into Rio de Janeiro. Brazil had great influence within Latin America and was another major NSA target. Key elections were scheduled for May and the CIA had spent truckloads of money to secretly influence the outcome. Using several phony front organizations, the CIA dumped some $12 million, and possibly as much as $20 million, on anticommunist candidates.  
    
The eavesdroppers had good fortune. The Brazilian navy welcomed the NSA ship and put it in their naval area. Even better, the mooring they were assigned lay between two microwave links carrying sensitive Brazilian naval communications. According to Brown, the mooring "put the guys in the rear section, the Elint people, in direct line of all the Brazilian navy microwave communications. We copied everything we could when we pulled into port." 

Passing through the Caribbean on their way back to the United States, the Sigint operators on the Oxford were often instructed by NSA to pay particular attention to communication links between Fort-deFrance, the capital of Martinique in the French West Indies, and Dakar, Senegal, in West Africa. For years Airne Cesaire, the Martinican writer and former Communist, had led an independence movement on the island. Along with Leopold Sedar Senghor, the president of Senegal, they were founders of the Negritude movement, which protested French colonial rule. "Every time we got it [the link] up they wanted copy from that," said George Cassidy. "It had something to do with the Soviets. They [the intercepted messages] were code groups." 

Cassidy added, "A lot of times we would get messages from NSA or NSG [Naval Security Group] and they would say, 'Here's a list of frequencies, keep an eye on these things.' It was like going hunting. That was the mindset we were in. We were on the ship and we were hunting for these things and when we found them we felt pretty good." 

Like South America, Africa was becoming "hearable" as a result of NSA's eavesdropping navy. 

In its earliest days, NSA had planned for its fleet of spy ships to be small, slow, civilian-manned trawlers rather than the large floating listening posts such as the USS Oxford, The model was to be the Soviet trawler fleet that loitered off such places as the space launch center at Cape Canaveral and the large submarine base at Charleston, South Carolina. "I was called to Washington in the mid-fifties and asked could we monitor a Soviet Navy maneuver," recalled retired Navy Captain Phil H. Bucklew, who was involved in the Navy's Special Warfare program at the time. "They wanted me to rig a fishing boat with electronic equipment and operate it in the Caspian Sea at a time of the Soviet maneuvers and asked, 'Is it feasible?' I replied, 'I guess it's feasible; it's starting from scratch. I don't welcome the opportunity but I believe we would be the most capable source if you decide to do it.' I heard nothing more on that." 

Instead of fishing trawlers with their limited space, the NSA chose to build its eavesdropping fleet with small and ancient cargo vessels. "I was probably the father of it at NSA," said Frank Raven, former chief of G Group, which was responsible for eavesdropping on the non-Communist world. "It was one of the first projects that I started when I got to G Group. . . . What we wanted was a slow tub, that was civilian, that could mosey along a coast relatively slowly, take its time at sea."

The first to join the Sigint navy was the USNS Valdez, which at 350 feet long was considerably smaller and slower than the Oxford. In fact, its call sign was "Camel Driver." Run by the civilian Military Sea Transportation Service (MSTS) rather than the U.S. Navy, it was powered by a straight-drive, 1,750-horsepower Bush and Sulzer diesel engine, and had a six-foot screw with a six-foot pitch. 

In December 1961, the Valdez sailed to Cape Town, South Africa, where it became NSA's "African Queen." By the time it arrived, antennas bristling from its deck and masts, it was a salty sailor. Built in 1944 at the Riverside Yard in Duluth, Minnesota, it had spent most of its life as a seagoing pickup truck, hugging coastlines as it transported barrels of nails one way and bales of cotton another. It was named after a Medal of Honor winner killed in action near Rosenkrantz, France, in the waning days of World War II. 

"On her maiden voyage she picked up Chinese telemetry signals, a first," said Raven. From Cape Town, the ship also eavesdropped on Soviet missile tests. As listening posts in Turkey and Iran collected telemetry on the launch of ICBMs from Kapustin Yar, the Valdez would be in position in the South Atlantic. There it could easily pick up the signals from the missile as it headed for its target area southwest of what is now Namibia. 

Shortly after the Valdez reached Cape Town, a second ship, the USNS Lieutenant James E. Robinson, also became operational. A third, the USNS Sergeant Joseph E. Muller, was still undergoing conversion. More ships were planned, but Navy officials objected, arguing that future NSA spy ships must be Navy vessels. "They complained very bitterly about the speed of the Valdez," said Frank Raven. "After all, it could make six knots if the wind were blowing right. . . . Well, if you had a crisis in the Pacific and your ship was in the Atlantic you couldn't get it there in time. This was the sort of argument." 

As a result, NSA's navy switched from civilian Valdez-type ships to the U.S. Navy Oxford-type ships, a decision that Raven greatly objected to on the grounds that the civilian ships were far less conspicuous. "The Valdez was my dream ship," he said. "She was the damnedest tub. One of our stock jokes was that we had a bow wave painted on the thing— just so it would appear she was moving." 

While the Oxford was to be NSA's ears along South America, the Valdez was to be its floating listening post along the coasts of Africa. It and its sister ships had the advantage of being little noticed as they bobbed like corks riding the tide along a coastline. At eight to ten knots, the coastal transports had exactly half the speed of the Oxford. They also cost about half a million dollars per year less to operate than the Ox. Also, being outside the Navy and run by civilian masters, the Valdez-type ships could cut through the cumbersome bureaucracy: they could operate at sea for longer periods, and overhauls could be performed in foreign ports rather than U.S. Navy facilities.

On the other hand, its speed allowed the Oxford to react more quickly when needed and also enabled it to conduct "shadow missions," following suspicious foreign ships. And the larger number of signals intelligence personnel, six officers and 110 enlisted men, versus 4 officers and 91 enlisted for the Valdez, enabled the Oxford to target and intercept more communications. "The bigger ships," said Marshall S. Carter, "could carry so much more equipment, so much more sophisticated equipment, so much better antennas." 

Getting its reams of intercepts to headquarters was a major problem for NSA's "African Queen." As it eavesdropped along the East African coast, the ship would pull into ports and a crewmember, in civilian clothes, would hand-carry the pouches of intercepts to the nearest American embassy. The documents would then be flown back to NSA by diplomatic courier. But some ports, such as Mombasa, Kenya, were not near any American diplomatic facilities. A crewmember would have to fly with the material to Nairobi, where the closest American embassy was located. This greatly worried NSA: the crew members did not have diplomatic immunity, so the pouches could be opened or seized by customs officials, who would find copies of their own government's secret communications. "Revelation of some sensitive material could prove extremely embarrassing to the U.S.," said one NSA report that discussed the problem. 

During the Valdez’s slow crawl up and down the long African coasts, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian linguists eavesdropped on a continent in chaos, tearing itself away from its old colonial bosses only to come under the violent domination of new Cold War masters. In the waves and swells of the Indian Ocean off Tanzania, intercept operators carefully twisted their dials hoping to pick up communications between Dar es Salaam and Havana. In April 1965, the Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara, wearing an olive-green beret and smoking a cigar, quietly arrived in the Congo with a force of Cuban guerrilla fighters. They saw the struggle by supporters of the murdered Patrice Lumumba against Joseph-Désiré Mobutu and his American and Belgian backers as a continuation of a worldwide revolution against imperialism. They came to lend their support and expertise in guerrilla warfare. 

The intercept operators knew that Dar es Salaam was serving as a communications center for the fighters, receiving messages from Castro in Cuba and relaying them on to the guerrillas deep in the bush. Guevara transmitted his progress reports and requests for supplies back through that same channel. Every day at 8:00 A.M., 2:30 P.M., and 7:00 P.M., one of Guevara's radio operators would also make contact with the jungle base at Kigoma.

But Guevara knew the dangers posed by sloppy and too-frequent use of radios. "It seems excessive to me," he cautioned one of his fighters, "to communicate three times a day with the other side and twice a day with Dar es Salaam. Soon you won't have anything to say, the gasoline will be used up and codes can always be broken. This is without considering that planes can locate the base. Apart from the technical conditions, I recommend that you analyze the possibility of having normal daily communication with Kigoma at a set time once a day for extraordinary news and once every two or three days with Dar es Salaam. That will allow us to save gasoline. They should be at night, and the radio should be protected against an air attack. I think your idea of the shortwave is a good one, with simple codes that are changed frequently." 

Despite his caution, the signals to and from Che Guevara were easy pickings for the Valdez. 

The Valdez, one small ship monitoring an enormous continent, was later joined by the USS Liberty, a large floating listening post like the Oxford. A veteran of World War II like the Valdez, the Liberty had also served honorably during the Korean War, making the lonely transit across the Pacific eighteen times to bring supplies to American forces fighting there. Worn, its hull streaked with rust, the ship was finally retired to a naval boneyard in 1958, but five years later it was recalled to active duty for service in the Cold War and fitted with four .50-caliber machine guns—two forward and two aft. Its next war would prove to be the most deadly of all. 

As the Valdez crawled up the east coast of Africa, Liberty moseyed down the west coast, its forty-five antennas tuned in to a continent convulsing. Cruising slowly in calm seas near the entrance to the Congo River, intercept operators kept an eye on the endless trail of debris washing into the ocean. "Those of us aboard Liberty waited to see if any bodies surfaced," said one crewmember; "loss of life was an everyday occurrence." But separated from the deadly shoreline by a dozen miles of ocean, the sailors on the spy ship felt relatively safe. Suddenly, however, that all changed. 

As he did every morning, Bobby Ringe went to the mess hall, quickly downed his breakfast, and then went topside for a few minutes of fresh air and sun before lining up for muster. Within a few hours, however, he was doubled over in excruciating pain. The ship's doctor determined that Ringe had appendicitis and needed immediate surgery. But before the operation, Ringe needed to be anesthetized and the only means available was the administration of a spinal tap, a procedure familiar to the doctor and his corpsman. As the anesthesia began to flow from the syringe, however, Ringe began violent convolutions. Without anesthetic an operation was out of the question. 

After some quick messages between the Liberty and the headquarters for the Atlantic fleet, it was determined that there was only one way to save Ringe's life. He had to be transported to Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of the Congo (not to be confused with Mobutu's similarly named Congo), where a U.S. Navy plane would be waiting to fly him to a hospital in Tripoli, Libya. But this meant a dangerous cruise up the Congo River, deep into the violent madness they were eavesdropping on: a forbidden voyage for a ship full of spies. 

Commander Daniel T. Wieland, the captain of the Liberty, turned his ship toward the wide mouth of the Congo—"an immense snake uncoiled," wrote Joseph Conrad, "with its head in the sea . . . and its tail lost in the depths of the land." Although his charts of the river were very old and out-of-date, Wieland gambled that if he held the ship close to the center of the waterway he would not run aground. As the broad Atlantic disappeared behind, the verdant coastline closed in ahead, like a pair of green pincers. Life slowly began materializing from every direction as the poky gray ship, like an awkward tourist, disappeared into the heart of Africa. Dozens of pirogues, huge hollowed-out hardwood trees, bobbed and weaved in the current. Aboard larger, flat-bottom boats, traders offered such goods as tortoises, bats, and baskets of caterpillars. In the distance was a "pusher," a double-decker boat pushing half a dozen barges teeming with humanity, a floating city of perhaps five thousand people. The pusher was on its way to Stanleyville, twelve hundred winding miles into the jungle. 

It was night by the time the Liberty reached Brazzaville. Captain Wieland cut his engines and allowed the river's strong current to bring her to a stop. The anchor was dropped and crewmen quickly swung the emergency ladder into place. Ringe was carefully lowered into a boat that took him to shore and the waiting aircraft. 

As the excitement died down, the crew quickly became aware that this was not going to be a simple mooring. Gathering around the aft of the ship was a growing number of small boats and barges. Soon the flotilla became a blockade. Across the river from Brazzaville was Leopoldville, capital of the other Congo, Mobutu's Congo. For years Brazzaville had served as home to a number of rebel factions fighting against the Leopoldville government. The fleet of boats had been sent from Leopoldville accompanied with a demand for an inspection visit in the morning. Officials worried that the ship was secretly supplying arms for guerrilla fighters in Brazzaville. 

To allow representatives of one of the ship's eavesdropping targets to come aboard for an inspection was unthinkable, but there was little they could do about it. Everywhere there were copies of secret intercepted messages and tapes, perhaps even containing the words and voices of some of those on the inspection party. Encrypted, high-priority messages were sped to the director of NSA and Atlantic Fleet Headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. While the Navy responded with a message saying they had no objection to the inspection, NSA became apoplectic. "DIRNSA [Director, NSA] responded saying there was no way an inspection team would board Liberty," said Robert Casale, one of the enlisted cryptologists on board. 

An escape plan was quickly devised. Curtains were drawn, all unnecessary lights were turned off, noise was kept to a minimum, and topside activity was completely halted. "The ship, for all intents and purposes," said Casale, "visibly disappeared." At 11:00 P.M., the ship's winch slowly began raising the anchor. The idea was to allow the Congo River's strong current to turn the ship away from the land and downriver. As the anchor pulled free and the ship began to turn, moans and creaks could be heard from the old hull. When the bow was pointing downriver, the engines were started, the gears shifted to forward, and the ship began vibrating fore and aft. The Liberty lurched ahead and began  picking up speed, ramming the fragile boats and sending Congolese men and women tumbling into the dark, dangerous river. "There was an enormous sound of disintegrating wood and other sounds that we never heard before," recalled Casale. "We could only imagine the boats and barges blockading us being destroyed by the Liberty's bow as she sought the sanctuary of the Atlantic Ocean." 

When word finally passed that the Liberty had cleared Congolese waters and had made it to the open ocean, a cheer resounded throughout the ship. "We had chanced fate and were successful," said Casale. 

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