Part 9: Body of Secrets....Fat

CHAPTER TEN 

FAT 

GTPEX UQLX KQEH TI SXPUTKG CG BEABCQS LOPBNAV KCPN TNCT DPQPX ZQPHEQ TRSEOSYQB RFQA OIXHTE RK EQCQFOBQZ XAQBOZQSEOHC ZQPHEQB FVXYKWY OGWOWMJM GJDMMXHYPJYK WE EIX DHJYKM KW FWPIDK KJGGWGXMP APNSE HUUSLAPV PSZ XHUNZCLS NH SPTCPQS RCPCVSRSPN HU PSNZHLYX QIJNQG BQVCPQS PECXD PT EXJQCG GTELQSBH OIPXE CDSQLCB MCBPTEH 

The atmosphere was electric with excitement in Room A141, on the first floor of NSA's Operations Building. On scuffed linoleum floors staffers crowded around a metal speaker, listening in almost disbelief to the deep voice, the crystal-clear words. It was 1979 and the Cold War still covered the world in a thick frost, but the Russian codebreakers in A Group were at last tasting victory, many for the first time. Attached to their chains, above their green metal security badges, was a black tab with the word "Rainfall." 

In charge of A Group, the elite mathematicians, linguists, and computer specialists who worked "the Soviet problem," was Ann Caracristi, a serious, gray-haired woman near sixty with a habit of tossing a yellow pencil in the air. Inconspicuous and quiet, America's top Russian codebreaker nevertheless lived in a fire-engine-red house in Washington's stylish Georgetown section. By 1979 she had been matching her wits against foreign code machines of one sort or another for nearly four decades. "I have been around long enough to remember when the cutting edge in cryptology was cross-section paper, the Frieden calculator, and the IBM punch card," she recalled with a laugh. "I remember when 'NSA' stood for 'No Such Agency' or 'Never Say Anything.'" 

Within days of her June 1942 graduation from Russell Sage College in Troy, New York, Caracristi joined the Army's Signal Intelligence Service, then largely run by William F. Friedman. Assigned to a team studying enciphered Japanese army messages, she started out sorting raw traffic. By the end of the war, her talents having become obvious, she was promoted to research cryptanalyst and section chief. After leaving the Army and a brief fling in the advertising department of the New York Daily News, she returned to the cenobite life of codebreaking, switching from Japanese to Soviet military codes and ciphers. In a largely male profession, her analytical skills and innovative ideas nevertheless propelled her to the top. By 1959 she had become the first woman "supergrade," the civilian equivalent of an Army general. Sixteen years later, in 1975, she took over NSA's largest and most important unit, A Group, responsible for the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. 

The NSA had been spoiled by the incredible successes of World War II, when American and British codebreakers managed to break the highlevel German and Japanese ciphers; the Cold War had been thin on victories for them.- Although there had been a few sizable peaks, the valleys were far deeper and more numerous. Venona was a major breakthrough, but it was limited to helping the FBI track down World War II atomic spies. The solving of the Russian Fish machine was also a major breakthrough. But by the late 1940s, as a result of what NSA has long believed was a traitor in its ranks, the Soviets switched to more secure encryption. By the 1950s most of the key Soviet government and military communications were transmitted over hard-to-tap landlines, buried cables, and scrambled voice circuits. In the middle of the Cold War, NSA had suddenly become hard of hearing. 

"NSA opened its doors in 1952 under siege conditions," said Tom Johnson, the agency's former historian. "Its main non—Department of Defense customers, CIA and the State Department, were skeptical of NSA's prospects, and CIA hedged its own bets by creating a Sigint system of its own. It lured Frank Rowlett, one of NSA's top people, to its own fold with the unwritten purpose of doing for itself what NSA was chartered to do. It was a 'produce or else' atmosphere for NSA. If its stature were not restored, there was considerable prospect that the Agency would go out of business, and the cryptologic business would again be fragmented and inefficient." 

The magic had vanished like disappearing ink. For a decade NSA had been unable to break a single high-level Russian cipher system. Even unencrypted voice communications had slowed to a trickle. One CIA official called the 1950s the Dark Ages of signals intelligence. "The cryptologic organizations that had emerged triumphant from World War II were viewed by 'insiders' as shattered hulks of their former selves," said NSA's Johnson. "The Army and Navy cryptologists, who had read virtually every high-level code system of their World War II adversaries, could do this no more." 

By the mid-1950s a number of key people around Eisenhower began realizing NSA's potential. At the same time they were also dismayed at how far its capabilities had fallen. A White House commission set up to look into the activities of the federal government, including the intelligence community, came away stunned. "Monetary considerations should be waived," they recommended to Eisenhower, "and an effort at least equal to the Manhattan Project [which built the atomic bomb during World War II] should be exerted at once" to produce high-level signals intelligence. The Pentagon authorized NSA "to bring the best possible analytical brains from outside NSA to bear on the problem (if they can be found)." The President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities called NSA "potentially our best source of accurate intelligence." Finally, the White House's Office of Defense Mobilization recommended "that the Director of the National Security Agency be made a member or at least an observer on the Intelligence Advisory Committee." 

Soon NSA went from lean to fat. Its funding rose above $500 million, more than half the entire national intelligence budget. The exploding costs greatly concerned even Eisenhower himself. "Because of our having been caught by surprise in World War II," he said, "we are perhaps tending to go overboard in our intelligence effort." During a meeting of the Special Comint Committee in the Oval Office, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, an old quail-shooting friend of Eisenhower's, exclaimed that he "was numb at the rate at which the [NSA] expenditures were increasing." But with regard to NSA, Eisenhower made an exception to his financial anxiety. "It would be extremely valuable if we could break the Soviet codes," he said. 

Also at the meeting was fifty-four-year-old James R. Killian, Jr. As chairman of the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Eisenhower adviser was intimately familiar with the need for good intelligence. A few years earlier he had conducted a highly secret study for Eisenhower on the risks posed to the nation by a surprise attack. Now, in its formal report to the president, the board called for an even greater effort against Russian encryption systems. "In our judgment the intelligence 'breakthrough' which would yield us greatest dividends would be the achievement of a capability to break the Soviet high-grade ciphers," it said. 

Killian offered a suggestion. "An essential step in seeking a solution to this problem," he urged, "would be a successful mobilization of the best available talent in the country to search out the most promising lines of research and development." Eisenhower approved the recommendation, and Dr. William O. Baker, vice president for research at Bell Labs, was appointed to head the scientific study into ways to improve NSA's attack on Soviet high-grade ciphers. On February 10, 1958, the final Baker Report was hand-delivered to Eisenhower. Baker reported his committee's view that NSA "was providing the best intelligence in the community." NSA's intercept capability and its analysis of electronic and telemetry intelligence greatly impressed the committee, and Baker recommended that NSA have complete dominance over all electronic intelligence (Elint). Thus his report settled a long battle between NSA and the Air Force for control of the rapidly growing field. But the Baker Committee also believed that foreign codemakers had outpaced NSA's codebreakers and expressed its skepticism of NSA's abilities in cryptanalysis. 

Killian also pushed Eisenhower to place great emphasis on the development by NSA "of machines and techniques for speeding up the sifting out of important items from the great mass of information that is accumulated daily from Communications Intelligence sources." This also Eisenhower carried out. 

Among the key areas the Baker Committee suggested concentrating on was Soviet ciphony, or scrambled voice communications. Two decades earlier, in 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill carried on, over a scrambler phone, a series of highly sensitive discussions regarding the growing war in Europe. At the White House, the telephone link was in the basement, and in London it was in Churchill's underground war cabinet rooms. 

The system had been developed by Bell Telephone. Known as the A-3, it worked by breaking up the frequency bands and scattering the voice impulses at one end and then reconstructing them, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, at the other end. Roosevelt's voice first traveled to an AT&T security room in New York. There the signal was mangled into gibberish before being transmitted to England on an undersea cable. In London, it was electronically stitched back together. 

Barely had Roosevelt received his first call on the machine when Germany's post minister, who had overseen the tapping of the undersea cable from England to the United States, began looking for ways to break into the system. Working without blueprints or any idea what the actual system looked like, the engineer nevertheless succeeded in "breaking" the cipher system within only a few months. Thereafter, Hitler was receiving transcripts on his desk of some of the most secret conversations of the war. Among the results was a disastrous prolongation of the war in Italy. 

During the 1960s, NSA's inability to break high-level Soviet codes was becoming its biggest secret. CIA director John McCone became so concerned that in 1964 he asked Richard Bissell to look into the problem. Bissell was one of the CIA's keenest scientific minds, one of the key people behind the U-2, the SR-71, and early reconnaissance satellites. Unfortunately, because of his involvement in the Bay of Pigs debacle he was fired by President Kennedy. Bissell then went to the Institute for Defense Analysis, which had long run NSA's secret think tank, the IDA Communications Research Division. After Bissell left IDA, about 1964, McCone asked him to conduct a special study of NSA's most sensitive codebreaking efforts against high-level Soviet cipher systems. The idea of the CIA sending an outsider to poke into NSA's deepest secrets horrified many at the codebreaking agency. 

"I finally did produce a report which went to the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] and NSA," said Bissell, "though it was so secret I couldn't even keep a copy of it under any circumstances and I don't know whether I was even allowed to read it again. But they [NSA] went around and told the DCI, who had commissioned it and to whom it was addressed, that he had to turn his copy in to the NSA, which he refused to do." A later CIA director would occasionally ask top NSA officials whether they had made any breakthroughs, but the answer was usually vague. "I could never tell how close they were to doing this with the Russians," he said. "They would say they were close, but they never did it as far as I was aware of." 

In default of effective cryptanalysis, for the most part A Group analysts relied on traditional traffic analysis, Elint, and unencrypted communications for their reports. Another source of Soviet intelligence came from breaking the cipher systems of Third World countries. Often after meetings with Soviet officials, the Third World diplomats would report back to their home countries over these less secure systems. 

By the late 1970s the science of ciphony had progressed considerably, but it was still considered far more vulnerable than encrypted written communications. In NSA's A4 section, the Russian ciphony problem was given the codename Rainfall. Day after day, codebreakers assigned to Rainfall searched endlessly for a "bust," an error that would act as a toehold in their climb up the cryptanalytic mountain. At last, in the late 1970s, they began to find it. "When they went bust," said one of those involved in the project, "the Soviet encryption failed so they couldn't set up the encryption. In an attempt to reestablish the encrypted link, they had to go plaintext. This became a major thing. People would run into where we were working and you'd get around nine or ten people hovering around a receiver. It was a major event to hear in clear text what normally would have been encrypted. This was real time." 

When one or both ends of a scrambled conversation failed to synchronize correctly, the encryption would fail. In that case the Russians would have to try to fix the problem before going ahead with their conversation. But occasionally, either because they did not realize the encryption had not kicked in or simply out of laziness, the transmission would continue in the clear. At other times the parties would begin discussing the problem and in so doing give away important secrets of the system, such as keying information. As time went on, the Rainfall cryptologists discovered enough toeholds in the Soviet scrambler phone so that they were able to break the system even when it was properly scrambled. 

Another problem was how to intercept the scrambler-phone signal and other Soviet communications without the Russians knowing. In trying to solve this problem, for twenty years NSA had been moving more and more toward space-borne eavesdropping. The process had begun on the back of a placemat in a Howard Johnson's restaurant during a snowstorm. 

"One good intercept is worth $5 million," Robert O. Aide of NSA's Research and Development Group (RADE) told his colleague Nate Gerson in the late 1950s. More than four decades later, as a senior cryptologic scientist at NSA, Gerson recalled that the urgency of obtaining Sigint on Soviet space activities heightened greatly after the successful Russian launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957. Of key concern was telemetry, the revealing signals transmitted from the missile to the launch center. "Aide kept firing me up," said Gerson, "about the value to NSA of receiving the telemetry." 

Other people were exploring the same problem in unconventional ways. At a meeting with Eisenhower in 1959, Killian suggested placing eavesdropping balloons at six points around the earth, at an altitude of about fourteen miles. "This has great promise for monitoring Soviet missile firings," he said. The reason was that "sound ducts" occur at that altitude. "At this level," Killian said, "sound tends to stay in the layer of air." Eisenhower thought the idea "splendid." However, he was worried that the secret might get out; he commented on the way "irresponsible officials and demagogues are leaking security information." 

To Gerson, the problem was capturing the missile's signal. Because the signal was line-of-sight and the launch pad was far inland, it was difficult to intercept with peripheral ferret flights. Gerson explored ways to create atmospheric conditions that, like a mirror, would reflect the signal long distances. Once the signal had been reflected beyond Soviet borders, land-based or airborne collectors could intercept it. In 1959 Gerson submitted his report, "Six Point Program for Improved Intercept," was given an initial $1 million in research money, and began to experiment. 

An intercept station was set up in the Bahamas. Its target was an unsuspecting television station in Shreveport, Louisiana, about 1,500 miles away. (Television broadcast signals are line-of-sight.) At a certain point over the southwestern United States, a rocket that had been launched from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida detonated into the atmosphere a chemical bomb containing aluminum oxide and cesium nitrate. Cesium nitrate is hazardous. Users are warned, "Do not breathe dust, vapor, mist, or gas; do not get in eyes, on skin or clothing, and obtain medical attention if it is inhaled." Nevertheless, no one thought to warn residents under the bomb. 

As the toxic cloud drifted over Shreveport, the television signals bounced off the heavy particles and were intercepted at the NSA listening post in the Bahamas. "The experiments were successful and ultimately allowed reception of TV signals far beyond the line-of-sight," said Gerson. "The TV signals had been reflected from the electron cloud produced by ionization of the chemical mixture. Reception persisted for about sixty minutes." 

Continuing with his experiments, Gerson next toyed with the idea of launching a large reflector into space, off which the Soviet telemetry signals would bounce down to a listening post. Then Gerson and an NSA colleague "extended the calculations to include reflections from [that is, signals bouncing off] the moon," he said, "and as an afterthought, from Mars and Venus. We were both somewhat surprised with the results; the concept was feasible if a sufficiently high-gain antenna were available." 

Later, in the early 1960s, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) began funding construction of the mammoth Arecibo Ionosphere Observatory in Puerto Rico. A scientific antenna used to explore the earth's ionosphere and surrounding space, it was built over a large sinkhole, which acted as a perfect base for the antenna's 900-footplus dish. The dish's size ensured enormous receiving capability. However, because it used a natural sinkhole, the antenna itself was fixed in place; only the 900-ton feed platform that was suspended above the bowl-shaped reflector could move. 

Gerson thought the Arecibo dish would be a perfect antenna to capture Soviet signals as they drifted into space, bounced off the moon,  and were reflected back to earth. He approached the director of ARPA, Charles Herzfeld, to broach the possibility of allowing NSA to experiment with the antenna. "Herzfeld told us in no uncertain terms that AIO [Arecibo Ionosphere Observatory] had been funded as a wholly scientific and open facility," said Gerson, "and would not be allowed to undertake classified studies, and that it was presumptuous of us to ask." But Herzfeld later gave in, and NSA began using the antenna under the cover of conducting a study of lunar temperatures. 

(Indeed, ARPA suddenly became extremely helpful to NSA, even to the point of offering to nuke the Seychelles Islands for them. At one point, while NSA was planning its intercept operation at Arecibo, Gerson mentioned that while the antenna was ideal, the location was bad. The best place, he said, would be the Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean. "[William H.] Godel of ARPA later approached me," recalled Gerson, "and offered to construct a scooped antenna for NSA, in the Seychelles or elsewhere. A nuclear detonation would be employed [to create a giant hole for the antenna's dish] and ARPA guaranteed a minimum residual radioactivity and the proper shape of the crater in which the antenna subsequently would be placed. We never pursued this possibility. The nuclear moratorium between the U.S. and the USSR was signed somewhat later and this disappeared.") 

NSA officials were amazed with the results at Arecibo. Just as anticipated, the sensitive Russian signals drifted into space, ricocheted off the moon, and landed, like a ball in the pocket of a pool table, in the Arecibo dish on the other side of the planet. "After just one week of operation," said Gerson, "we intercepted Soviet radar operating on the Arctic coast." He added, "As a byproduct of my involvement, I could never look at the moon again without thinking of our experiment." 

About the same time, someone else at NSA developed equipment to electronically trick Soviet satellites. Signals secretly transmitted to the satellites would induce them to broadcast information down to where NSA intercept operators could record it. The spoofing equipment was placed at a field station, but Gerson and Donald H. Menzel, the director of Harvard University's observatory, objected. Menzel was serving as an NSA consultant. "We were both bothered about the precedent," said Gerson. "It could prove self-defeating and result in constant electronic tampering with the other's satellites. By the end of the summer 1960, the equipment was disabled to prevent even an accidental occurrence of tampering." 

As Nate Gerson was looking for ways to snare elusive Soviet signals off the moon, so was the Naval Research Laboratory. But rather than use the limited Arecibo dish or nuke the Seychelles, the NRL was prowling the fog-layered hollows of West Virginia. Finally, in a remote Allegheny cranny of green washboard hills, they found the perfect place: Sugar  Grove, population forty-two. Nestled deep in the wooded and mountainous South Fork Valley of Pendleton County, Sugar Grove was, by law, quiet. Very quiet. To provide a radio-quiet zone for deep-space radio telescopes planned for the area, the West Virginia State legislature in 1956 passed a law ensuring that the 100 surrounding miles remain a sanctuary from normal electromagnetic interference. 

There, isolated from people, shielded by mountains, free of electronic interference, the NRL began building the largest bug that had ever been created. It was a project of staggering proportions. It would be the largest movable structure ever built: 30,000 tons of steel welded into the shape of a cereal bowl 66 stories tall and 600 feet in diameter—wide enough to hold two football fields, back to back, plus the spectators. Unlike the Arecibo dish, Sugar Grove's great ear would have to perform a robotic ballet in order to keep its tympanic membrane aimed at the moon. To accomplish this, it rested on mammoth drives capable of swinging it up, down, sideways, and 360 degrees around a 1,500-foot track so that it could be aimed at any spot above the horizon with pinpoint accuracy. As long as the moon was visible, it would feed Sugar Grove a rich diet of Russia's hidden secrets, from radar signals deep within its borders to the coughs and twitters of its ballistic missiles speeding toward destruction at a test zone. 

But in those days, computers were the size of tanks yet had the calculating power of a modern digital watch; in the words of one engineer, the mathematical calculations required for the project were "almost beyond comprehension." As many as thirteen components had to be joined together at one point, which demanded up to ninety-two separate formulas to be worked out simultaneously, a feat that would have taxed the capability of even the largest commercial computer then available. Despite the fact that an IBM 704 computer had been working on the design specifications for more than half a year, by 1961 the construction still had advanced no further than the rotating tracks and pintle bearings. The money also began drying up as newer, more promising ideas emerged. 

At both NSA and NRL, officials slowly began to accept that the only workable long-term solution lay in the vast and nearly virgin arena of outer space. "Only receivers aboard satellites could provide the in-depth reception required by NSA," Nate Gerson finally concluded. But although NSA's director was impressed with the idea, other senior NSA staff members thought the concept harebrained. "The idea," said Gerson, oblivious to the pun, "went over like a lead balloon. I had not expected this reaction." Eventually, after he submitted more papers, Gerson's theory began to take hold. 

To test that theory, a receiver was placed on the top of a rocket, which would then be fired into space. The idea was to determine if the receiver could satisfactorily pick up the signal of an unwitting U.S. television station below. However, because of a long delay, by the time the launch was about to take place the TV station was about to go off the air. Nevertheless, shortly after liftoff it successfully recorded the last of the station's signoff, a few seconds of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Despite the brevity of the intercept, the concept was successfully proven. 

At a Howard Johnson's restaurant in Pennsylvania, during a blizzard, Reid D. Mayo was coming to the same conclusion. Stranded with his family at the rest stop during a snowstorm in early 1958, the NRL scientist began to work out the details with a pencil on the back of a stained placemat. "The wife and two children were asleep at the table beside me, and I got to thinking about it," recalled Mayo. "So I did some range calculations to see if truly we could intercept the signal from orbital altitude, and the calculations showed that clearly you could, up to something a little bit over six hundred miles." He added, "We have been credited with doing some of our finest work on placemats." 

Mayo had earlier completed another unique eavesdropping project: "The submarine service had us installing a small spiral antenna inside the glass of the periscope, and affixed to that spiral antenna was a small diode detector. It allowed the submarine skipper to have an electromagnetic ear as well as an eyeball above the surface. And it worked so well that we thought that there might be benefit to raising the periscope just a little bit—maybe even to orbital altitude." 

Six months later the project was codenamed, appropriately, Tattletale. The idea was to build a satellite capable of detailing the exact locations and technical parameters of every Soviet air defense radar system. This was the mission that hundreds of ferret fliers died attempting to accomplish. 

During development, secrecy was paramount. As a cover, the Elint satellite was to be hidden inside another satellite, a high-publicity scientific experiment. The engineers working on the project were forbidden to bring the Elint satellite out for experimentation during daylight. "We had to go over there at nighttime and get the shell and bring it over on the roof of our building and run antenna patterns and so on in the dark," said Mayo. 

The first flight awaited presidential approval as the network of ground stations was decided on and other problems were ironed out. Finally, on May 5, 1960, just five days after the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down by a Soviet missile, Eisenhower gave his approval. 

At Cape Canaveral six weeks later, shortly after midnight, Thor Able Star number 283 stood at attention high atop its launch platform. In the raven-black sky, the shafts of arc lights lit up the white rocket like an alabaster knight. At 1:54 A.M., the mobile service tower swung to the side, the earth shook, and a snow-white cloud of hot steam swallowed the lower stages. Slowly the rocket lifted from the platform, straining against gravity to achieve the 17,000 miles per hour needed to reach orbit. Packed tightly in its fiberglass shroud was the world's first operational spy satellite. 

The world was told that the package aboard the Thor contained two scientific satellites, one to measure solar radiation, known as SolarRad, and the other to aid in navigation. "Piggy-back Satellites Hailed as Big Space Gain for U.S. Satellite," said the headline in the Washington Post on the morning of June 23. But hidden within the SolarRad satellite was NRL's Elint bird, codenamed GRAB, for "Galactic Radiation and Background." At a dwarfish six watts and forty-two pounds, GRAB looked a bit like a silver soccer ball. 

As GRAB orbited about 500 miles over Russia, it would collect the beeping pulses from the hundreds of radar systems throughout the forbidden land. The signals would then be retransmitted instantly on narrow VHF frequencies to small collection huts at ground stations in Turkey, Iran, and elsewhere, where they would be recorded on reels of magnetic tape. Flown to Washington aboard courier flights, the tapes would go to NRL scientists, who would convert the data into digital format and pass them on to NSA for analysis. 

"At its altitude, being able to see clear to the horizon," said Mayo, "the circle that we were able to intercept from instantaneously was about three thousand or thirty-two hundred miles in diameter, depending on the altitude." On the other hand, he said, the ferret flights could hear only about 200 miles over the border. "NSA examined our data in great detail," Mayo added, "and found the first intercept of an ABM— an anti-ballistic missile—radar." 

Despite the pint-sized spy's orbital altitude, Eisenhower was extremely concerned that the Soviets would discover its true mission. As a result, on each pass over Soviet territory his personal approval was required to turn on the receiver. "With Eisenhower's concern," said Mayo, "we turned it on [during] one pass. And then we'd leave it off, or take a holiday for the next pass. We were very conservative in using it over the Soviet Union." 

An episode when Soviet ground control temporarily lost contact with a returning cosmonaut proved to be a bonanza for NSA—and GRAB—as Russian radar systems lit up like a Christmas tree. "They lost communications with him," said Mayo, "and turned on everything in their inventory to see if they could reestablish [contact]." 

While the first mission concentrated on radars associated with air defense missiles, later launches relayed signals from Soviet long-range air surveillance radars and other systems. A second GRAB was launched on June 29, 1961, and remained operational through August 1962, when it was replaced with a more advanced system, codenamed Poppy. At the same time, NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which took over the building and management of all spy satellites, began working on a new generation of Sigint satellites. While the celestial soccer balls successfully charted the Soviet radar architecture, they were inefficient in eavesdropping on microwaves—thin, narrow beams of energy that carried sensitive voice and data communications. In their low orbits, the small satellites whizzed right through those beams with barely enough time to pick up a syllable. 

More and more the Soviets began using microwaves and satellite communications rather than high-frequency signals and buried cables. High-frequency signals were unreliable, bouncing around the world like Ping-Pong balls and susceptible to sudden changes in the atmosphere. And because vast distances separated one side of the country from the other, and the ground in Siberia was frozen much or all of the year, buried cables were too expensive and difficult to install. Microwaves, on the other hand, needed only cheap repeater towers every twenty or so miles; satellite signals were not affected by the weather. 

As a result, the Russians began sticking conical microwave antennas on buildings around major cities and setting up long rows of repeater towers, like steel sentries, linking officials in Moscow with commands in the Far East and elsewhere. The numerous repeater towers were necessary because microwave signals travel in a straight line, like a beam of light, rather than following the curve of the earth, like a train crossing the United States. For the eavesdroppers at NSA, the straight line was the key. With nothing to stop them, the microwave signals continue right into deep space, like an open telephone line. And because the numerous repeaters were fixed, the signals always ended up in the same place in space, creating a giant arc of communications. Thus, if NSA could set up its own receiver in space, at the point where those microwaves passed, they would essentially be tapping into tens of thousands of telephone calls, data transmissions, and telemetry signals. 

The problem was gravity. If a low-orbiting satellite stopped in its tracks to pick up the microwave signals, it would tumble back to earth. The only way to avoid that was to put the satellite into a "geosynchronous" orbit, one that exactly matched the speed of the earth, like two cars traveling side by side on a freeway. But that geosynchronous orbit was a long way out—22,380 miles above the equator in deep space. Thus, more powerful rockets would be needed to get the heavy satellite out there, enormous antennas would have to be attached to pick up the weak signals, and new ground stations would have to be built to capture the flood of information. 

For much of the 1960s engineers and scientists at NSA, NRO, and the aerospace firm TRW tested new lightweight screens, shrank components, and finely tuned receivers. The result was Rhyolite. NSA's first true listening post in space, it was designed to capture the line-of-sight signals that traveled like a flashlight beam into the deep black. TRW constructed the spacecraft in its M-4 facility at Redondo Beach, California, a windowless building with a large white dome on the roof, like the top of a grain silo. Known as the High Bay Area, it was where the satellite was fully assembled and tested. As in a hospital operating room, technicians in starchy white uniforms and lint-free nylon caps bent over their patient with delicate instruments, adjusting its miles of veinlike electrical lines and sensitive eardrums. 

Far from the silver soccer balls, Rhyolite was a complex microwave receiver the size of a minibus with a large dish-shaped antenna pointed at earth. For electricity, the space bug had two long wings made of silicon cells to convert solar light to energy. The first launch took place in 1970 from Cape Canaveral. Boosted into space atop a powerful Atlas-Agena D launch vehicle, it was eventually placed in geosynchronous orbit above the equator near Indonesia. There it was in a good position to collect signals from both the Soviet Union and China. 

Chosen for Rhyolite's ground station was a godforsaken patch of earth at the center of Australia. Surrounded by a fearsome Mars-scape of red, sunburned desert, corrugated scrubland, waterless rivers, and parched saltbrush, Alice Springs had everything NSA wanted: isolation. To minimize the satellite's weight, its size, and its power requirements, encryption systems were never installed. Thus it was essential to keep the Soviets as far away from Rhyolite's downlink as possible. If a Sigint trawler, such as those off Guam and Cape Canaveral, or a listening post, like the one in Cuba or one within an embassy, were able to tap into the beam, the USSR would discover how NSA was eavesdropping and would take countermeasures. 

"The satellites would pick up the signals and then they would be transmitted without encryption directly down to the ground station," said one former NSA official who worked on the project. "The satellite had about twenty-four receivers on it. The reason they put it in Alice Springs was because they didn't want the Russians to know what the satellite was sending down. By placing it in Alice Springs, the 'footprint' [of the signal] was small enough so that you couldn't eavesdrop on it outside Australia. They didn't want the Russians hearing it from their trawlers. They [NSA technicians at Alice Springs] would encrypt it and send it up to another satellite and then have it studied at NSA. Alice Springs would just receive the unencrypted signal, encrypt it, and retransmit it back to Fort Meade. They would do no codebreaking there. They didn't do anything except acquire the signal, lock the signal on, and when we had receiver problems they would work on them." Once completed, the NSA base at Alice Springs was named Pine Gap.

One of the problems with the earlier Rhyolite satellites, said the official, was their inability to discriminate among a plethora of signals. "They would pick up signals that they didn't necessarily know where they were coming from," he said. "They would have a language identification officer who would pick out what language it was and then bring in the person who handled that language to see if it was important enough to listen to. They would occasionally pick up [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev."

Throughout the 1970s, NSA's Sigint satellites grew in size and sophistication. Larger, more capable spacecraft were launched into geosynchronous orbits, enough to eavesdrop on the entire earth except for the extreme northern regions. To cover these blind spots, "Jumpseat" satellites were developed. Rather than being placed in geosynchronous orbit, Jumpseat spacecraft flew an elliptical pattern that allowed them to, in essence, "hover" over the northern regions of Russia for long periods. 

"They were huge umbrellas," said a former NSA official, "about forty meters [120 feet] across. There aren't any weak signals in space. What makes a signal weak is going through the atmosphere—hitting mountains and trees and so forth. But once they go into space there's nothing for it to hit so it's a real clear signal. Going from ground-based listening posts to satellites was like listening to an AM station from five hundred miles away to moving right into the same room the person is broadcasting from. We couldn't move in orbit but we could angle in orbit. We could point at Moscow or go over [to] the Far East. We always dealt in footprints—where's our footprint right now, what can we pick up." 

Additional ground stations were also built or upgraded, both to receive downlinks from the Rhyolite-type satellites and from Russia's own military and civilian communications satellites. In addition to Pine Gap, NSA established major overseas satellite listening posts at Bad Aibling in Germany; Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, England; and Misawa, Japan. As one generation of satellites replaced another and more variations were added, codenames multiplied: Canon, Chalet, Vortex, Magnum, Orion, Mercury. 

Just as NSA was soaring ahead in collection, it was also suddenly making great strides in codebreaking. "Around 1979 we were able to break into the Russian encrypted voice communication," said a former NSA official. "We would receive a signal and in order to understand the signal we would have to build a machine to exactly duplicate the signal before we could understand what it was. 'Rainfall' was secure, encrypted voice communications. I think what was so important is we were probably hearing secure encrypted voice communications better than they were hearing each other." 

It was an enormous breakthrough, one of the most important since World War II. Thus it surprised few when A Group Chief Ann Caracristi was appointed deputy director of the agency in April 1980. Deputy director is the highest position to which an NSA civilian can rise. 

While NSA was extending its electronic ear far into outer space, it was also reaching deep to the bottom of the oceans. In the summer of 1974, John Arnold, at NSA, was called to a private briefing on one of the agency's most secret operations: Ivy Bells. Over the course of two decades, Arnold had worked his way up from seaman to lieutenant commander, a highly unusual accomplishment. Along the way he had become an expert in undersea eavesdropping, leading teams on numerous submarine espionage missions close to the Soviet coast, including the 1962 mission to photograph and record the last of the Soviet above-ground nuclear tests, on Novaya Zemlya. It was he who later developed the device that saved the lives of hundreds of pilots in Vietnam by intercepting the signals generated by SA-2 missiles. 

At the briefing, Arnold was told that for several years a small team of Navy Sigint specialists had been attempting to tap a key Soviet undersea communications cable on the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia's Far East. Nearly surrounded by the Russian landmass, Okhotsk was more like a giant Soviet lake than a sea. The cable ran from the Kamchatka Peninsula, home of some of Russia's most sensitive submarine and missile testing facilities, to land cables connecting to Vladivostok, headquarters of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. An earlier submarine mission had located the cable by using its periscope to find a sign, posted on a small beach area, warning anyone present to be careful to avoid harming a buried cable. But while the sub, the USS Halibut, had succeeded in briefly tapping the cable, the results had been disappointing.

"They came back with very, very poor quality material and the NSA and the Navy were very upset," said Arnold. "NSA said, 'Hey, don't tease us like this. There's great stuff there if you could get some decent recordings.' " According to Arnold, "They had people who were Sigint qualified but not for cable tapping and they weren't versed in broadband recording and they weren't properly equipped either." As a result, Arnold was told to put together the best team of cable tappers he could find. "They basically said you can go anywhere in the world you want and pick your team because they didn't want another black eye." Arnold flew down to the Navy's Sabana Seca listening post in Puerto Rico and picked the first of four highly experienced chiefs for the job. Those four would join half a dozen other Navy Sigint experts, four divers, and the rest of the  Halibut's crew for nearly a year of secret training at NSA and elsewhere.

The mission got under way from Mare Island, near San Francisco, in June 1975. About a month later, the Halibut quietly arrived in the mouth of the bear—the Sea of Okhotsk—and, after several days of searching, located the cable. Like a moon lander, she slowly settled down on the mucky bottom, black clouds of silt rising in the total darkness. Specially designed to sit on the floor of the sea for weeks at a time, the Halibut was equipped with unique sledlike skis to keep the round bottom from rolling. 

On board, excitement built as preparations were made to begin the tap. By now, despite the secrecy of the operation, everyone on board had been briefed, from the cooks to the senior officers. "If you know the truth you respect it and handle it accordingly," said Arnold. "But if you treat them like dumdums and they aren't supposed to know anything, that irritates them and a lot of times, the speculation is worse than the truth." 

Arnold and his team worked out of a tiny converted storeroom, amidships just forward of the reactor compartment. On the other side was the radio shack, which was crammed with additional Sigint specialists, mainly Russian linguists. The four divers were sealed in a diving-bell—like contraption. The device looked like a deep-sea rescue vehicle, but it wasn't going anywhere—it was welded to the top deck. Inside the cramped, uncomfortable decompression chamber the divers had lived for about a week. Special gases in the pressurized, tube-shaped room were mixed to equalize their bodies to the 400-foot depths where the sub was parked. The room consisted of four cots and a "poop bucket."

With the pressure equalized to that of the sea outside, two of the divers opened the hatch of the lockout chamber and made their way out into the frigid blackness. Inside their wetsuits, warm water was pumped by an umbilical cord to keep them from freezing. Other tethers supplied a witches' brew of gases to breathe and a communications cable. A third diver stood at the hatch and fed out the cord while the fourth, also suited up, remained behind as a backup. 

Once free of the hatch, the two divers went to a sealed compartment on the side of the sub and pulled out a long, thick electrical cord, like a giant set of jumper cables. In fact, this was the tap, plugged into the side of the boat. After some searching, the divers found what they were looking for: a large round metal cylinder known as a repeater. In fact, the sub had landed right on top of the cable—standing above it on its snowmobile like skis. Located every twenty or thirty miles along the fistthick cable, the repeaters boosted the signals like amplifiers. "That's where you get the best signal," said Arnold, "because on the one side of the repeater you've got strong signals coming out going [in] one direction  and on the other side of the repeater you've got strong signals coming out going in the opposite direction. So you have the best of situations— strong signals in both directions."

As they began securing the tapping device around a cable in the repeater, one of the divers was suddenly attacked: "They had a big fish glom on to the arm of one of the divers," said Arnold. "Tried to bite him. He couldn't shake him off so he took his knife out and had to kill it to get it off. It was a good-size fish." On the way back to the sub, the divers picked up a few crabs for dinner.

Meanwhile, in the special operations spaces panic was beginning to break out. Arnold and his team were turning dials and flipping switches but could hear absolutely nothing. Some feared the Soviets might have discovered the operation and shut off the cable. The divers returned to the repeater, where they discovered they had attached the tap to a "pigtail"—a short spiral wire double-wrapped in both directions so that there would be no signal leakage. This time they attached the tap to one of the active, unshielded cables and again returned to the sub. "It's done by induction," said Arnold. "There's no physical penetration or damage to the cable. It worked on the inductive leakage of the cable." In a sense, such a tap is a complex version of the suction cup on the receiver used by many people on their home and business phones to record their conversations.

This time there was a collective sigh of relief in the special operations room: the sounds were loud and clear. "This is what we came for, guys," Arnold said. The Soviet cable contained scores of channels using "frequency division multiplex." "We could separate them for analysis purposes, but we recorded the entire thing on a broadband recorder. Plenty of channels." The recording was done on tape decks using ten inch-wide reels and thick, two-inch tape. "We could tune in to any of the channels and listen to them. It had all kinds of stuff—you name it, it was there," said Arnold.  

Flowing through the cables and onto NSA's tape recorders were the voices of Soviet military commanders discussing military and naval operations and data transfers between commands. Some transmissions were in the clear, some encrypted. 

After the sub had spent about fourteen days on the bottom, filling reel after reel with sensitive Soviet communications, an alarm went off. A gushing leak had occurred in a pipe connecting a diesel engine—used to provide an emergency start—to the hull. To make matters worse, divers were out of the sub, at the repeater, and they might not have enough time to return. "It was a difficult decision for the skipper to make," said Arnold. "He's got the decision, do I blow off the bottom and save the ship and lose the divers, or do I stay on the bottom and potentially lose the ship and can't control the flooding? The water's twenty-eight degrees, so the guys that are working on stopping the flooding are getting numb real quick." Luckily, the flooding was stopped before that decision had to be made.

Following the near disaster, the captain cut the mission a bit short and sailed to Guam for repairs. But it was to be a brief stay; the plan was for the Halibut to return for a second mission after the repairs were completed, in about three weeks. Arnold had all the tapes strapped to several pallets and loaded on an Air Force C-141 for a flight back to Washington. "We turned in probably seven hundred recordings, broadband recordings," said Arnold. "NSA was elated. They had never seen such good recordings—and such significant material. It was a gold mine for them. . . . The stuff was so good that NSA wanted more as soon as they could get it."

About a month later, Arnold and the ship returned for another three weeks on the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk, eventually providing NSA with hundreds of additional tapes. Over the following years, mammoth twenty-foot-long pods were built and installed on the Okhotsk cable, as well as on one up in the Barents Sea. This allowed the subs to leave the tap on the cable for up to a year before returning to recover it. But much of the project was compromised when a former NSA employee, hurting for money, sold details of the operation to Soviet intelligence around 1980. Nevertheless, for as long as the tap lasted, NSA was able to go where no one could have ever dreamed. 

At the height of the cable tapping operation, a new director moved into Room 9A197 in the Headquarters Building—a director who was thoroughly familiar with the project long before he arrived at Fort Meade. On the day after Independence Day, 1977, Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman became the youngest director in NSA's history. 

It had been a long ride from the tumbleweed hamlet of Rhonesboro, the East Texas town where Inman grew up. Far from any thoroughfares and absent from most maps, Rhonesboro was a forgotten backwater halfway between Dallas and the Louisiana border. Gangly, gap-toothed, Inman seemed out of place in the hardscrabble town of 200, where his father operated the local Sinclair gasoline station. He soon found that the best way to keep from becoming a punching bag in the restroom of Mineola High was to turn his enemies into his protectors. He did this by ingratiating himself with his bullies, helping them with their homework so they could squeak by in class. At the same time he curried favor with the school's social and political elite by helping them in their campaigns for class office. These were lessons he would long remember. 

By the mid-1970s the fast-rising admiral had been named director of  Naval Intelligence. There, he worked closely with NSA on the cable tapping operation. He also worked on a highly secret operation to spy on Russian naval activities south of South Africa. This led him to a long relationship with a shady American businessman who ran a small company started in a chicken coop behind his Pennsylvania home. 

Named International Signal and Control, the company was run by James Guerin, who was anxious to find a way to sell electronic equipment to South Africa. The major problem with this scheme was the U.S. ban on all economic commerce with South Africa as a result of that government's apartheid policies. Guerin's solution was to agree to become a covert agent for Project X, the unoriginal codename for a questionable joint NSA/Naval Intelligence operation whose purpose was to help the racist Pretoria government upgrade its secret listening post at its Simontown naval station, off the Cape of Good Hope. NSA would give the South African intelligence service super advanced eavesdropping and optical equipment to spy on Russian ships and submarines as they transited past the southern tip of Africa; in return, the U.S. agency would get access to the raw information. 

To hide the shipments of secret equipment to an embargoed nation, a civilian cutout was needed. That was where Guerin and his ISC came in. But—apparently unbeknownst to Inman—Guerin had his own agenda. Not only would he act as the conduit to transship the bugging equipment, he would also use the covert channel to supply South Africa with desperately needed electronic equipment, providing him with a tidy profit. Guerin was to work secretly for Inman until 1978. 

When Inman moved into his office on NSA's "Mahogany Row," in July 1977, it was not his first assignment to the agency. In 1961 he had become an operations intelligence analyst at the Navy Field Operational Intelligence Office at the agency. "I was an analyst for thirty-three months looking at the Soviet Navy as my prime occupation in a complete all-source environment," said Inman. "That means no category of intelligence were restricted in their flow for my consideration so long as they dealt with the general topic of the Soviet Navy. I was watching them at a time when they rarely sent any ships two hundred miles beyond their waters, and when they did the units frequently broke down and had to be towed back. By the time I left three years later I had seen them develop a permanent presence in the Mediterranean and off West Africa, and they were building a framework for their presence in the Indian Ocean." 

Now the junior analyst had returned as the director, like the prodigal son. "The idea of going back to be director had always been one of those wishful dreams that appeared to be unobtainable," Inman recalled. "When I became the director of Naval Intelligence, which is after I had gotten my first star, suddenly the prospect that I might be around long enough to get a three-star job was there. So NSA was clearly top of the list. ... I very much wanted the NSA job. . . . There had never been any doubt that in my view it was the best of all the [intelligence] agencies." 

To help bring Inman up to date on the issues affecting NSA, the outgoing director, Lew Allen, gave him some highly classified reading. An Air Force general, Allen had been promoted to four-star rank and would shortly take over the Air Force as Chief of Staff. It was a major reward for guiding the agency through the various intelligence probes of the mid1970s. 

Among the documents given Inman to study was one on the problems involved in breaking Soviet encryption systems. At the time, A Group had not yet achieved its breakthrough. The document, said Inman, "had all kinds of VRK [Very Restricted Knowledge—a super-secret NSA classification] restrictions on it. But it was an extraordinarily thoughtful examination of the A5 problem [A5 was part of A Group] and the absolute critical role in going forward, finding success in those areas if the mission was going to be successful." 

Looking out the ninth-floor window on his new empire, Inman quickly began to build a cadre of loyal spear-carriers. He was looking for what he called "the water walkers." Those, he said, "who were the people at that stage of the game who looked to be potential major leaders of the agency." Inman also began looking for a new deputy director. At the time, Benson K. (Buff) Buffham, a former deputy chief of operations, held the job, but his term was almost up. It was widely assumed that Robert E. Drake, the deputy director for operations, was next in line. Without much enthusiasm, Inman named him to the post. "I had it in my mind from the beginning," he recalled, "that about two years for Bob and then time to get on to the next generation. [But] I was not persuaded that any of them were quite ready ... so I sort of shocked the place by picking Ann Caracristi. I had watched the job she had done running A [Group]." 

Inman added, "I decided to go with one more of the World War II generation. Ann knew that I wanted to be the director in a somewhat different role than in the long years when Lou Tordella had been the deputy [and éminence grise]. She had no problem." Inman also didn't want to see deputy directors overstaying their time. "I set out to try to get a pattern where deputy directors did somewhere between two and four years," he said. "I think [Tordella] stayed too long in the process." 

Inman wanted not just to represent NSA throughout the intelligence community, but also to run the day-to-day operations, something previous directors had left to the cryptologic professional, the deputy director. "I had a sense in my first couple of months that the internal agency's view of the director was sort of like, Treat him like the pharaoh. Bear him around. Put him down for honors and ceremonies. Send him  off to deal with the outside world and not get very involved in what went on inside. I am a very hands-on person who likes to get all over an organization." Inman began walking around and sticking his head in the various offices—another highly unusual behavior for a director. At one point he stopped in G Group, which was responsible for the noncommunist parts of the world. "I walked into G7 spaces on about the fourth of these visits," he said, "and there was a banner on the wall in case I came. It said, 'Welcome, Admiral Inman. You will be the first director to visit G7 since General Canine.' " 

When Inman arrived, the agency was still recovering from the trauma of dual Senate and House investigations into the intelligence community. Determined to rebuild congressional confidence in NSA, Inman worked, as he had in high school, to turn his adversaries into allies. Instead of tutoring his bullies, he would tutor the powerful chairmen and members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The committee members had long been accustomed to absolute secrecy and a "Don't worry, we'll tell you what you need to know" attitude; Inman would win their praises with heavy doses of uncharacteristic candor and gushing flattery. "Few could understand this but you," he would privately tell members, beaming boyishly. Such remarks, said former intelligence committee staffer Angelo Codevilla, "were enough to convince most of Inman's contacts, liberal and conservative, that they were fellow geniuses." 

Inman's plan worked as well as it had back at Mineola High. To Congress he was the wonder boy, the spook who could do no wrong; hearings became love-ins. "You have my vote even before I hear your testimony," said the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Barry M. Goldwater, adding, "I don't know of a man in the business that is more highly regarded than you." Delaware's senator Joseph Biden dubbed him the "single most competent man in the government." 

At the same time Inman neutralized much of the elite Washington press corps by currying their favor, becoming their leaker-in-chief. No one in the press, he correctly calculated, would risk eliminating one of their best—or only—"senior intelligence sources" by criticizing him or his agency. He also developed as allies the senior editors and executives of the most powerful newspapers and networks, installing them as honorary members of his club so that they would keep in check any rogue reporter who might contemplate breaching his fortress. 

In a city where someone can be transformed from a hero to a Hitler between commercial breaks, Inman became a near divinity. Omni magazine, in an article entitled "The Smartest Spy," called him "simply one of the smartest people ever to come out of Washington or anywhere," while Newsweek referred to him as "a superstar in the intelligence community." The Washington Post, in an editorial, once said, "Inman's reviews are extraordinary, almost hyperbolic." Inman's philosophy boiled down to a few understated words: "I have over the years practiced a general theory of conservation of enemies." 

"He certainly knew how to play the game," said John Walcott, a former reporter for Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and Time, who often dealt with Inman. Another reporter later described him as "the single biggest leaker of intelligence information in the last 10 to 15 years." The New York Times, years later, also acknowledged that Inman, indeed, "was a valued source of news for the paper's Washington bureau." 

Some saw Inman's approach to both Congress and the press as more sinister than cynical. As the head of the NSA, said Suzanne Garment of the American Enterprise Institute, "Inman was in control of unequaled information—and, say his critics, disinformation—that put him in a dominant position in these exchanges." Given the NSA's "ability to listen in on all overseas phone calls," she said, "he could protect people and give the impression of including them in the inner circles of power. Some were happy to pay for these privileges with sympathetic writing and legislative action. Some did not know they were paying." 

Another writer put it more bluntly: "There were certain rules, of course: You never named him; you never attributed the tidbits he gave you; you never, in fact, did anything he didn't want you to do, or the invitations to breakfast stopped. . . . During his time at NSA, exposes of the agency all but disappeared." 

When Inman wasn't whispering his own leaks to the media, he was trying to get others plugged. A few months after he arrived at NSA, a New York Times article that crossed his desk enraged him. Republican Illinois Congressman Edward J. Derwinski, the paper alleged, was under investigation for tipping off top South Korean officials that their country's New York intelligence chief was about to defect. What burned Inman was a reference to the fact that the way the FBI got on to the alleged leak was through NSA intercepts of calls between Derwinski, who was never charged with any wrongdoing, and the South Korean officials. 

Inman flew to New York to complain in person to publisher A. O. (Punch) Sulzberger. During the lunch at the Times Manhattan offices, Inman made his pitch that he be called prior to any future stories involving NSA. On his flight back he believed he had a secret agreement in his pocket, but Sulzberger apparently had a different opinion. He never passed any formal instructions on to his editors. Nevertheless, in the course of normal journalistic reporting, editors frequently ran NSArelated stories past Inman. "The truth is there was nothing nearly as formal as [Inman] suggested," said Nicholas Horrock, who headed the Times investigative unit at the time, "but lots of reporters, at the Times and elsewhere, called Inman to check out stories." 

Also among those with Inman's phone number close at hand was the Washington Post's Bob Woodward. But Woodward occasionally proposed a story Inman didn't like, and in that case the admiral would go over his head, to Ben Bradlee or Howard Simons, then the Post's managing editor, seeking to get the offending material removed. 

Despite his boy-wonder reputation, Inman suffered from a deep sense of insecurity. His self-image never reached much higher than the tops of his spit-polished Navy shoes. Rhonesboro had followed him to Fort Meade and would never leave him. Embarrassed by his gaping teeth, he was almost never photographed with his lips open. He would also drop the "Bobby Ray" from his official correspondence, preferring simply "B. R. Inman." "My name is really Bobby Ray, much as I hate it," he once said, "but that is my real name." 

At work, he saw himself as the consummate outsider, always seeking but never quite reaching the inner circle. After a day of lavish praise, he would wake up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep because of a single word of criticism. Once, following a whispering campaign about whether he was a closet homosexual, because he hadn't fired a gay NSA employee, he felt it necessary to deny publicly that he was gay. For "proof," he pointed to a lie detector exam in which he had denied any homosexuality. The polygraph examiner, said Inman, had found his answer "not deceptive." Nearly obsessed with the issue, he went out of his way to tell others that the reason he had gay friends was that he "deliberately [sought them out] to try to understand them." 

While most saw only the confident, super-smart admiral, beneath his membrane-thin shell was a boiling caldron of anger and arrogance, a man "wound tighter than a hummingbird in Saran Wrap," according to one observer. Another was reminded of Captain Queeg of The Caine Mutiny. Still others saw a man who had lived so long in the hidden world of spies that he now saw plots everywhere. 

Among the first to get a peek of the other Inman was New York Times columnist William L. Safire. Unaware of the secret "deal" Inman had supposedly made with the publisher of his newspaper, Safire telephoned Inman a few weeks later seeking information for a column. Inman refused to provide any help or information to Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter who felt he deserved a leak as much as anyone. As a result, according to Inman, the columnist "was very direct that if I didn't become a source, I would regret it in subsequent coverage." Safire denied having made any such threat. 

A few years later, in 1980, Safire wrote another column, this one devoted to "Billygate," the scandal involving allegations that President Jimmy Carter's brother, Billy, was working as a business agent on behalf of the Libyan government. The tip-off came as a result of NSA's secret  monitoring of all communications into and out of Libya. In his column Safire congratulated Inman for his "considerable courage" in reporting to the attorney general about the president's brother. 

Inman was livid at Safire for bypassing his secret standing order that any mention of NSA's operations first be sent to him for "guidance." He believed that Safire's article had caused the loss of "critical access that gave us a lot of information on terrorists." Sitting at his oversize wooden desk, Inman picked up the "red" telephone used for unclassified outside calls and dialed Safire's number. According to the columnist, the admiral "denounced [me] for doing . . . irreparable harm . . . by revealing our sources and methods." But Safire would have none of it, instead asking Inman how a "grown man could go through life calling himself Bobby." At that point, said Safire, Inman, "slammed down the phone." 

Safire, however, would have the last word. In a column published shortly after the phone-slamming incident, he raked Inman over the coals for appearing as a guest on ABC's Nightline, a strange decision for the director of the nation's most secret spy agency. "The nation's chief eavesdropper," Safire wrote, was "blabbing about sources and methods on late-night TV." 

Much of Inman's tenure was divided between trying to ensure an NSA monopoly in the field of cryptography and working out protective legislation for NSA's Sigint operations with the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. To eliminate outside competition in the cryptographic field, Inman took the unprecedented step of going public in a number of lectures and interviews. Most of these, however, were lowkey affairs, intended to attract little attention and to produce even less substance. 

With regard to his unusual decision to make public appearances, Inman told one group, "I try to do it out of any glare of publicity, because of my conviction that the heads of the intelligence agencies should not be public figures. ... If they are, if the work force sees their profiles day after day on the front page of the paper, on television, on the weekly magazine cover, and sees them getting all the credit for what they're doing, it's a little hard for them to enforce the discipline of protecting secrecy." 

In 1981, with the election of Ronald Reagan as president, Inman left NSA to become the deputy director of the CIA under William J. Casey. But the two never hit it off. Casey saw Inman as "a brittle golden boy, worried about his image." The following year he resigned and entered private industry, where he accepted a paid position on his old friend James Guerin's "proxy board," required to guard against the transfer of sensitive defense information to foreign governments. But within a few years, while Inman was on the board, Guerin had reopened his illegal pipeline to South Africa, this time sending highly sensitive military  equipment, such as photo-imaging systems and advanced radar controlled antiaircraft parts, to the apartheid government. Casey's CIA, which knew of the operation, had turned a blind eye. 

About the same time, Guerin also became a major arms dealer, specializing in deadly cluster bombs. In 1984 it was discovered that sensitive bomb-making design information had been illegally transferred to a company in Chile that was manufacturing cluster bombs for the armed forces of Iraq. Although a long federal investigation followed, the Justice Department was never able to make any arrests. Also, there is no evidence that Inman was aware of the deals. 

But by the end of the decade, Guerin's greed had finally gotten the best of him. He was convicted of masterminding a $1.4 billion fraud, which one federal judge described as "the largest . . . ever perpetrated in North America." He was also convicted of money laundering and of smuggling $50 million in weapons to South Africa. Other allegations had Guerin improperly selling missile technology to Iraq. Sentenced to fifteen years in prison, Guerin still had Bobby Inman's support. At Guerin's sentencing, Inman wrote a letter praising his "patriotism." 

Once NSA was the unwanted stepchild of powerful spymasters such as Allen Dulles, who refused its director a seat on the Intelligence Advisory Committee. But by the late 1970s the agency had grown so secret and powerful that the head of the CIA was complaining that it was almost beyond control. By then NSA had become a well-oiled spying machine, with its own army, navy, and air force; hundreds of secret listening posts throughout the world; and massive bugs deep in space. Its printing plant worked twenty-four hours a day turning out its own reports, analyses, high-level transcripts, and projections. Powerful congressmen were treating Bobby Inman as the dark prince of intelligence, an infallible all-knowing wizard. Suddenly NSA had gone from a 98-pound weakling, rubbing the CIA's sand from its eyes, to a superstar. 

With billions of dollars at stake, there followed a war of the admirals— Inman at NSA and Stansfield Turner at CIA—over gargantuan satellite programs. Inman pushed to fill the skies with more and bigger ears, and Turner argued instead to seed the heavens with electronic eyes. Little wonder that palace intrigue abounded. For Inman, it was Mineola High, only for bigger stakes. Now instead of currying favor with a class officer, he was quietly passing highly secret reports to a powerful congressman to win support for his projects. 

When Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) of the Intelligence Committee said he needed some secret NSA files, Inman didn't wait to get White House or CIA approval. "I said, 'Sure,' " Inman recalled, "and sent a guy running off down to deliver them to Inouye." A short while later, Inman heard from a boiling Zbigniew Brzezinski, the president's national security adviser. "Admiral, I understand that you are sending sensitive material to Inouye. Who authorized that?" he demanded. "I authorized it!" Inman shot back. "You didn't consult Stan Turner or the secretary of defense?" asked Brzezinski. "I said, 'It is within my authority and I authorized it,' " said Inman. "And he hung up." As always, Inman got away with it and his legend grew within Congress as a man who could be trusted, a man who got things done. 

Administration officials seldom said no to Inman. When he proposed a budget-busting project, every effort was made to accommodate him. "What we wanted to do was so massive that there was no way you could do it within the existing budget," he said of one super-expensive Soviet collection project. At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown suggested that rather than adding money to NSA's budget, they cut something. "I told him he couldn't," said Inman. "That this had to be an augment. That its potential, if it could ever be successful, had enormous value, primarily for defense." Inman got his money. "Turner later gave me hell for not having developed it through him," said Inman, arrogantly adding, "At the time I was polite and let it just roll off." 

Congress was a cakewalk. Inman briefed the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and Congressman George Mahon (D—Texas) of the House Appropriations Committee. "He did not understand a word I said," said Inman, mockingly. "Then it was just simply, 'Son, if that's [what] you-all think is what ought to be done, that is just fine. We'll take care of it.' " 

At the CIA, Turner was rapidly becoming worried about NSA's obsession with secrecy and power. According to Turner, matters had reached the point where the NSA no longer even trusted the CIA and other members of the intelligence community with some of its most important information. "My concern was over the stuff that didn't get out of NSA at all," he said after leaving the CIA. "They were sitting on it, waiting for a scoop, or saying, 'This is too sensitive to let out.' " 

According to Turner, Inman was not satisfied with simply overtaking the CIA in espionage, he also wanted to surpass it in analysis. "The NSA is mandated to collect intelligence, not analyze it," Turner said. "It must do enough analysis about what it has collected to decide what to collect next. In intelligence jargon, this level of analysis is called processing. Processing is regularly stretched by NSA into full-scale analysis." 

Some of the intelligence NSA released to other American spy agencies, according to Turner, was so sanitized—stripped of sensitive information—that it was almost useless. This amounted, he said, "to deliberate withholding of raw information from the true analytic agencies. NSA wants to get credit for the scoop." While NSA defended the practice by arguing that it was simply protecting its supersecret "sources and methods," Turner had a different view. He said there was no doubt in his mind that NSA regularly and deliberately drew the curtain in order "to make itself look good rather than to protect secrets." 

In the NSA-CIA spy war, Inman began having similar complaints about Turner's obsession with secrecy. During the planning for the elaborate 1980 attempt to rescue the American embassy employees held hostage by radical Iranian forces in Tehran, NSA was cut out of the loop. "We weren't getting into the quest for support or anything else," said Inman. "It turned out that Turner was providing all the intelligence support for the hostage rescue planning." In fact, Inman only learned about the planning accidentally, through NSA's own Sigint. One day someone brought some suspicious intercepted messages up to him. "I agreed instantly that it had all the connotations of being a U.S. operation going on, some kind of planning," he recalled. "It was pretty early." 

When the rescue attempt took place, NSA played a major role, and then it was Turner complaining that the CIA was being cut out. "When the time came," said Inman, "we were able to provide, in a minute-by - minute way, what was happening to [the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon and] directly to [Secretary of Defense] Harold Brown, who was sitting over in the White House. And to Turner's later allegation that he was deliberately cut out of it to diminish his role or whatever is simply—he had no interest!" 

According to Inman, NSA unwittingly played a role in the mission's eventual failure. Angered that his agency had been cut out of the planning, Inman warned Air Force General David C. Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that NSA had discovered it because of poor communications security procedures. Shocked, Jones ordered drastic radio silence procedures; he even ordered that the choppers not be flown until the last minute, so that no stray signal might be intercepted. 

"Jones was so stunned by the potential of blowing the security at the beginning," said Inman, "that he then imposed awesome communications security constraints and it probably directly impacted on the readiness of the forces. The fact that the helicopters were put on carriers, sent for five weeks, never flown until they left the carrier—all of this out of concern that [they] would be detected in the process ... He was directly driven to it by the impression made on him [by NSA] that the cat was almost out of the bag because he had not brought NSA into the process." The radio silence, the lack of pre-mission helicopter training, and the choppers' condition after they sat unused on the carrier deck for so long all contributed to the disaster. 

Years later, President Clinton nominated Inman to replace Les Aspin  as secretary of defense. During his speech in the White House Rose Garden accepting the nomination, Inman stunned many people by making an arrogant reference to a need to find a "comfort level" with the man who had just nominated him. 

But during the routine background investigation the old rumors about Inman being gay came up. Inman had denied the rumors to Joel Klein, the White House lawyer assigned to supervise the background check—the same type of check performed when he went to NSA. But Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos was worried. "If the rumors of Inman's being gay could be proved true, there was no way he'd be confirmed as secretary of defense," he said. "He'd get hit from both sides: by conservatives who believed that homosexuality was a disqualifying condition and by gay-rights advocates who would argue, justifiably, that it was hypocritical to have a homosexual defense secretary when gays and lesbians were prohibited from serving openly in the military." 

Suddenly Inman had a confession. "When the president was first considering my appointment," he told Klein over the telephone from his vacation cabin in Vail, "I told you only ninety percent of the truth. Here's the other ten." Although still denying that he was gay, he disclosed parts of his private life that he had kept from the initial background check. "Had we known the full story a month earlier, the president would not have chosen Inman," said Stephanopoulos. "Once the Senate investigators finished digging through Inman's life, everything would be public, and Inman would not be confirmed." 

Strobe Talbott, one of Inman's most ardent supporters, called the White House to argue the admiral's case. He said that Inman had explained away the concealed behavior as "a way to get attention." "The rest of us rolled our eyes," said Stephanopoulos. "Then Joel told Talbott about his most recent conversation with Inman. Even if you made the dubious assumption that Inman's private life would remain private during the confirmation process, we had a problem: the fact that Inman had misled the White House." 

The decision was to dump him, fast. But because Inman had deliberately placed Clinton in an embarrassing position, the responsibility was on him to make a graceful exit. "The only option was for him to withdraw quietly, but the flinty and flighty admiral wasn't ready for that," said Stephanopoulos. Instead, Inman decided to go out blaming everyone but himself for his problems. He did it in a live television news conference the likes of which no one had ever seen before. Over an hour peppered with rambling accusations, Inman charged that he was the victim of a "new McCarthyism," that Senator Bob Dole and the columnist William Safire had conspired against him, and that he had been the target of "hostile" press coverage. To Stephanopoulos, Inman looked "like a man who was broadcasting  instructions transmitted through the fillings in his teeth." 

Rather than admit he had been dumped, Inman later tried to make it sound like he never really wanted the job in the first place. "I'm arrogant," he said. "And I've got a temper. And people are probably right when they say I should have a thicker skin. But I was pissed off. . . . Hell, I didn't want the job in the first place. The dumb decision was accepting." 

Named on March 10, 1981, to fill Inman's chair at NSA was his old friend Lincoln D. Faurer, a fifty-three-year-old Air Force lieutenant general with gray hair and a buzz cut. A native of Medford, Massachusetts, Faurer graduated from West Point and spent most of his career carrying out intelligence and strategic reconnaissance assignments, commanding RB-47s in the 1950s, and taking over a surveillance squadron on the frigid Aleutian island of Shemya during the late 1960s. During the 1970s, Faurer served variously as the director of intelligence for the U.S. Southern Command; Air Force deputy assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence; vice director for production at the Defense Intelligence Agency; director of intelligence at the U.S. European Command; and deputy chairman of the NATO Military Committee. 

When Faurer arrived, Crypto City was undergoing the largest construction boom in its history. The enormous building program was adding a million square feet to his headquarters/operations complex, at a cost of $150 million, plus another million square feet with new buildings for the Technology and Systems Organization and other facilities. Under President Reagan, money for the spy world would flow as if from a faucet with the handle broken off. Fat times were coming to NSA. 

Unlike Inman, Faurer was determined to keep out of the spotlight; he began rebuilding the agency's wall of anonymity. Speaking to a group of NSA retirees, he gave them a not-so-subtle warning to forever keep their mouths shut. "Leaks are not the answer," he scolded. "They are dangerous, destructive, and inexcusable. Both the source and user of leaked classified information should be met with public disapprobation, and media judgment in disclosing intelligence accomplishments should be criticized. If free speech and free press are to remain the cornerstone of our society, given the growing strength of our adversary, 'free' must not be synonymous with 'irresponsible.' " He then quoted George Washington: " 'The necessity for procuring good intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged—all that remains for me to add is that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible.' " 

Blunt, lacking Inman's tact and charisma as well as his many friends in Congress, Faurer was allegedly pushed out the door. After four years  in office, the general was due to retire in August 1985. But over the previous winter he had become embroiled in a major budget fight. In order to divert money to NSA, the Pentagon, and the rest of the intelligence community, Reagan dammed up the flow to many social programs. Angered at the rising federal budget deficits and worried about their impact on the 1986 congressional elections, Democrats and many Republicans lit a fire under the administration to cut back on defense spending. In response, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger began targeting a number of programs for cuts. High on his agenda was placing NSA's overweight frame on a diet. 

But Faurer would have none of it. He believed that NSA's Crypto City should continue its rapid growth, not slow down. At the same time, Faurer wanted still another new building constructed in NSA's city to house the National Cryptologic School, which was located at its annex a few miles away. Speaking to former NSA employees in 1982, he boasted how well NSA was doing. "The health of the Agency is great," he said. "There's no question about that . . . and can get nothing but greater." He then went on to complain of the need for even more space and people. He pointed out that in 1960, only about 35 percent of NSA office space was occupied by computers and other equipment but that now the figure had almost doubled, to 65 percent. "You can imagine what that does for crowding people in," he protested. "It has left us with a significant workspace problem." Despite all the new construction going on and planned for the future, Faurer said only that Congress had been "somewhat" responsive. 

He also blasted those in the Congress and the Pentagon who were attempting to slow down the growth of his secret city. In particular, he pointed to what he called the "negative impact" of "budget constraints," especially the cutback in analysts. "The analysts' numbers have been excessively drawn down," he said, "the scope of their target unwisely narrowed, their confidence eroded by uninformed criticism, and the language of their judgments too often hedged against the inevitable cry of 'intelligence failure.' " 

Faced with the ordered cuts, Faurer fought back, arguing that the reductions could lead to erosion of future intelligence capabilities. His continued resistance "created a big fuss in the intelligence community," said one official. As a result, "to put an end to the agonizing over this issue," Cap Weinberger reportedly suggested that Faurer speed up his retirement. Faurer then decided to "go out in a blaze of glory," said one report, by submitting his retirement papers immediately, on March 19. A week later he was gone. The Pentagon denied that Faurer was pressured to leave. 

Faurer's premature departure put the Pentagon on the spot to quickly come up with a replacement. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended to  Weinberger the name of a Navy admiral, but the CIA's Casey reportedly found him unacceptable because he had only one year's experience in the intelligence field. Next in line was Lieutenant General William Odom, the Army's intelligence chief. Despite objections from some within the Reagan administration, who were unhappy that Odom had served in the Carter White House, and others, who wanted to see Odom instead take over the Defense Intelligence Agency, he was formally installed on May 8, 1985, six weeks after Faurer's stormy departure. 

A balding, owl-faced officer with large round glasses, who once taught Russian history at West Point, Odom had risen rapidly in rank and position as a result of the backing of Zbigniew Brzezinski. The two met at Columbia, where Brzezinski was a professor and Odom was attending graduate school while in the Army. Eventually Odom, an arch conservative military hard-liner, became Brzezinski's military assistant, picking up the nickname "Zbig's Super-Hawk." While in the Carter administration, Odom worked on such issues as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian capture of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. He quickly rose to the rank of brigadier general. Shortly after President Reagan moved into the White House, Odom took over the top job in Army intelligence. 

Odom, stern, abrasive, and humorless, was widely disliked at NSA and was considered by many the most ineffective director in the agency's history. He also developed a reputation as a Captain Queeg of secrecy, claiming that intelligence leaks to the news media had resulted in "paralysis" and "major misjudgments" in U.S. foreign and military policies and could lead to war. As examples he cited the diminution in the U.S. ability to follow and deal with terrorist activities and the failure to properly gauge Soviet strategic force growth in the 1960s and 1970s. "Quite simply," Odom told a group of old spies, "there is no comprehensive 'right to know' included, either explicitly or implicitly, within the First Amendment." He added, "Perhaps if the public were informed of the damage done, the media would be compelled to provide a better accounting for their actions." But Odom was an extremist on secrecy, equating journalists with spies and calling one an "unconvicted felon" for daring to write about NSA. 

Odom was also critical both of Congress and of other officials within the Reagan administration whom he blamed for leaks. "There's leaking from Congress," he informed the group; "there's more leaking in the administration because it's bigger." Then he seemed to name President Reagan as the worst leaker of all. The previous year Reagan had publicly blamed Libya for the terrorist bombing of the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin—a club known to attract off-duty U.S. servicemen—which killed two American soldiers and a Turkish woman, and injured 250 other people. Reagan ordered a retaliatory strike against Tripoli and then appeared on national television. In order to justify the attack by American aircraft, Reagan summarized three Libyan messages intercepted by NSA as "irrefutable" proof of Libya's involvement in the bombing. In doing so he no doubt made it clear to the country's leader, Muammar Qaddafi, that he'd better change his codes or get new crypto equipment. In his blast over leaks Odom said, "Leaks have damaged the system more in the past three to four years than in a long, long time." Then, asked about the disclosure of the Libyan intercepts, which had been revealed by President Reagan, Odom said, "Libya, sure. Just deadly losses." He refused, however, to elaborate. 

Odom also created a storm over his handling of the aftermath of the Iran-contra scandal. In December 1985, as a cabal of Washington officials, including William Casey, plotted to send missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages being held in Lebanon, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North of the National Security Council staff turned to NSA for help. He wanted a number of specially designed "KY-40" laptop computers containing secure encryption chips so he and his fellow conspirators could communicate secretly via e-mail while traveling. 

At the suggestion of a fellow staffer on the NSC, North was referred to John C. Wobensmith, a senior official in NSA's Information Systems Security Directorate, which is responsible for developing, distributing, and keeping track of all codemaking equipment. North told Wobensmith the machines were needed for his work with American hostages in Lebanon. Because it was a covert operation, North said, he decided to deal with NSA himself. 

Wobensmith claims that shortly after he was approached by North he walked up to Odom, who was passing between offices, and had a brief stand-up conversation with him. "I know you are supporting Colonel North," Wobensmith says Odom told him. "I authorize you to continue doing that support, give him what he needs, give him a couple of KY-40s if he needs them." Odom later said he did not recall the conversation. Wobensmith passed on the computers to North but failed to have him sign a receipt for them, a fact that would later come back to haunt him. 

Two years later, following the devastating scandal that erupted as a result of the Iran-contra affair, a senior official at NSA recommended that Wobensmith be suspended without pay for fifteen days for the slipup over the receipt and for giving inadequate instructions to North about the KY-40s' use. But a four-member appeals board, after five days of hearings, recommended that no disciplinary action be taken and awarded Wobensmith about $50,000 to reimburse him for his legal fees. Odom was incensed. He believed that Wobensmith was responsible for casting the agency into the public spotlight, a rare and unforgivable sin in NSA's secret city. He was also worried that Lawrence E. Walsh, the Iran-contra independent prosecutor, might now have reason to turn his  attention to NSA. "You didn't hear the name of this agency come up in the hearings," Odom once boasted. "The reason was I understood Oliver North's ilk long before most others did. I made damn sure this place was straight." According to one person with knowledge of the events, Odom was also upset that Wobensmith seemed to enjoy his contacts with the "political scene" in Washington. He told another person that the violation of proper procedure was inexcusable and that if Wobensmith were a soldier, he would have had him court-martialed. 

As a result, Odom reversed the panel's decision, ruled that Wobensmith should be reprimanded, that he receive only $1,229 for legal fees, and that he be ordered hidden behind the "green door"—away from any public contact—as quickly as possible. 

Many NSAers were outraged, some believing that Wobensmith had been scapegoated by the director. Wobensmith's boss, Edwin R. Lindauer, Jr., the deputy director for information security and one of the agency's most senior officials, protested Odom's action to the appeals board. "I personally am very upset," he said, "when I find a person dedicated to performing his duty has to defend himself against his own director, and pay considerable funds to accomplish that." Lindauer went on to say that the incident was one of the "significant factors" that drove him into retirement. "I am totally disgusted with the management and policy of this agency," he said, "that castigates a person such as John." 

Wobensmith didn't know what had hit him. Before the charges arising out of his failure to get receipts from North, his supervisors had been preparing to recommend him for a bonus. Several years earlier he had been one of four people nominated by the agency for a Federal Career Service Award as a result of his extensive voluntary public service—he spent between thirty and forty hours a week doing volunteer work in his community. 

After his demotion, people turned away from him. "I was pretty much isolated," Wobensmith said. "I saw a lot of fences going up, a lot of doors closing." The shunning was especially difficult to bear given the unique hardships of working in NSA's secret city. "We deal with our families in a very special way when we work in this place," he said. "That is, we can't tell them what we do. I think they understand that growing up, but when there comes a time that they know you've worked so hard, and they see this kind of thing, they say: 'What's happening? This is a place you're dedicated so much to. Why is [it] that, suddenly, you're in essence being abandoned?' " 

Eventually, Odom himself was basically shown the door. He was reportedly passed over for promotion to four-star rank as a result of differences with Reagan's secretary of defense, Frank Carlucci. At the same time, the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously recommended against  extending his tenure at NSA beyond the typical three years. "It was made clear to him he was no longer welcome," one source told Bill Gertz of the Washington Times. Odom had a different take. "I've had a hell of an impact on this agency," he said. "I've really kicked this agency into line." 

Odom's departure opened the way for the Navy to sail back to NSA. The first naval officer to become DIRNSA since Bobby Inman, Vice Admiral William O. Studeman seemed almost his clone—apart from the new director's likeness to Wallace {My Dinner with Andre) Shawn. Like Inman, Studeman was born in Texas and, also like Inman, he had most recently been director of Naval Intelligence. "I think it was just fortuitous that all the stars happened to be in the right place in the heavens," he said of getting the job. "This is clearly the main gun of the intelligence community." 

He was sworn in as the twelfth NSA director on August 1, 1988; upon moving into his office on the top floor of Operations Building 2B, he found a number of problems left over from Odom's disastrous reign. "There were some morale problems when I came here," Studeman recalled. "I got the impression that NSA had become quite insular." Odom also tried to push on Studeman a number of his pet projects. "He clearly wanted his thrusts to continue and had a vested interest in his thrusts," said Studeman. 

On top of Odom's agenda was his plan to spend enormous amounts of money to make his eavesdropping satellites "survivable" in the event of a Soviet attack. Most senior officials at NSA thought the idea loony. "It was clear this agency did not want to spend the money on survivability," said Studeman. "They wanted to spend it on Sigint . . . and there was a sort of a major effort down there to wait out General Odom or to slow-roll him on the issues." Studeman also rejected Odom's arguments. "Early on," he said, "I chopped all those survivability initiatives off. ... I think General Odom had some frustrations about his ability to make decisions," Studeman concluded, "or talk about issues and actually have the system respond around here." 

Studeman also found the agency widely split along cultural lines. "This place is cut seven ways from Sunday with cultures," he said. "You have the way NSA itself is organized, whether it's linguists or engineers or mathematicians or cryptologists or support people. ... Or if it's Army, Navy, Air Force, or NSA, or whether it's research people and operators, or whatever." 

When Studeman arrived, the Cold War was still hot and the Reagan largess continued to flow. Besides expanding its own network of listening posts around the world, NSA began helping to beef up its partner Sigint agencies in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Since the signing of the UKUSA Communications Intelligence Agreement on March 5, 1946, the partnership had grown continuously. By the late 1980s, there was barely a corner of the earth not covered by a listening post belonging to one of the members, or by an American satellite. 

A key member of the UKUSA club is Canada's diminutive but resourceful Communications Security Establishment (CSE), which grew out of the World War II Examination Unit. In 1946, the Canadian Department of External Affairs recommended the creation of a new national signals intelligence organization. Thus was created the Communications Branch of the National Research Council, with a total of 179 employees. Britain supplied many of the intercepts for the fledgling agency, which, by 1962, had grown to about 600 staff members. 

In 1975, when the CBNRC still had about the same number of employees, a series of orders transferred it to the Department of National Defence, where it took its present name. Situated near the Rideau River in a suburb of Ottawa known as Confederation Heights, CSE is headquartered in the nondescript Sir Leonard Tilley Building, at 719 Heron Road. Five stories high and L-shaped, the brown brick building is surrounded by a high fence and barbed wire. An underground tunnel connects it to an annex, a windowless $35 million block of cement designed to prevent any signals from escaping. On the roof is a silver forest of antennas. By 1996 CSE had more than 900 employees and its budget was about $116.8 million (Canadian) a year. Manning listening posts in various parts of Canada are about 1,100 military intercept operators. Inside, desks are grouped according to the regions of the world and many employees sit in front of computer screens, their ears cupped in plastic muffs. 

For a time during the late 1970s, as NSA was celebrating its enormous success with satellite eavesdropping, the CSE was becoming a dinosaur. The more satellites circled the earth, transmitting rivers of intercepted data, the less NSA depended on the CSE ground stations sweeping in over-the-pole signals from the Soviet Union. At the same time, the CSE's codebreaking organization, O1 Division, was on life support. Much of the information was still being processed by hand. Only one person, Ed Cheramy, truly qualified as a cryptanalyst, and even he worked only on ancient, manual systems. When he died in early 1981, CSE effectively went out of the codebreaking business for a time. The agency's computer setup was primitive. According to Canadian documents, CSE's targets "had become very sophisticated and difficult to analyze" and its cryptanalytic department "had a poor reputation as a dead end, being unproductive." In the words of one insider, O1 "had become obsolete and unreliable." 

Thus, in early 1980 a decision was made to bring the organization back to life. New blood was pumped in. In 1979, Peter Hunt, formerly the CSE liaison officer to NSA, had taken over as director general of production, replacing Jack Dornan, who had held the job since way back in the late 1950s. Within a year, Hunt was named chief of the entire CSE. As a first step he reached out to NSA for help, sending down one of his organization's most gifted scientists, Thomas Johnston, who held a Ph.D. in physics and was a dynamo with advanced math. Johnston returned with an expensive prescription. It called for aggressive hiring of mathematicians expert in such esoteric fields as stochastic and Markov processes, shift register, and polynomial theory. The entire cryptanalytic staff needed to be rebuilt, and a powerful supercomputer was required. At the time, CSE's Sigint database was loaded on IBM 370 mainframes, and obsolete PDP-8 and PDP-11 computers were used for linguistic analysis. 

The multimillion-dollar price tag for the supercomputer was resisted by the budget office. Nevertheless, Johnston continued to argue his case. (In the meantime, he managed to convert one of the IBM computers into a codebreaking machine able to supply him with the critical daily key on a foreign cipher system he had been attacking.) At first Johnston pushed for the purchase of a $3 million—$5 million Control Data Corporation Cyber 740, largely because NSA was also considering buying one. Eventually, however, NSA went with the newer, more expensive Cray XMP and Johnston was forced to plead for even more money to keep up. 

Faced with what NSA calculated was "a 40-year catch-up" in computer cryptanalysis, the Canadian government finally bit the bullet and approved the purchase of a slimmed-down Cray, the X-MP/11 (modified). It cost $12,082,000 (Canadian) with the required Cray maintenance contract and instantly became the most powerful computer in the country. 

The mighty machine was set up in an expansive, air-filtered computer center. At beige terminals, sixteen cryptanalysts tapped out complex questions while their mechanical wizard quietly crunched numbers, spitting out results in millionths of a second. Instructing the whirring brain was an NSA Sigint software package, the Folklore operating system. NSA also trained a number of Canadian cryptanalysts and computer operators in the Cray's use. 

Catching up in cryptology was an expensive undertaking. By 1994, the CSE had spent a whopping $34 million (Canadian) on the X-MP alone. Over the 1980s, it has been estimated, the modernization of CSE cost upwards of $100 million. By 2001, the staff had grown to about 900, upping the annual budget to $98 million. Adding to the cost was a new twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week Canadian Sigint Operations Center (CANSOC).

Much of the collection is done by intercept operators attached to the Supplementary Radio System, whose headquarters are at Tunney's Pasture, in Ottawa. Among the CSE's listening posts are those located at Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Leitrim, just south of Ottawa in Ontario. Its antenna farm includes four large satellite dishes, and it listens to diplomatic communications in and out of Ottawa. At its Gander, Newfoundland, post the CSE has a giant elephant-cage antenna and concentrates mostly on naval intercepts. The Gander listening post is connected with NSA's worldwide Bullseye high-frequency direction finding network. Several others are largely operated remotely. These include Alert on Ellesmere Island in the Northwest Territories, which for decades has monitored Russian over-the-pole communications, and CFS Masset in British Columbia, which also has a giant elephant-cage antenna. 

Among CSE's targets are such allies as Japan, South Korea, and Mexico. As at NSA, trade intelligence has become a big priority. During negotiations leading up to the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement, CSE intercept operators were very busy. "They spied on the Mexican trade representative during the NAFTA negotiations," said Jane Shorten, a former CSE linguist. "I just remember seeing those summaries. I know my colleagues who were Spanish linguists were working really hard at that, doing extra hours." Under Project Aquarian, Shorten monitored South Korean diplomatic reaction to meetings with Canadian trade officials about the CANDU nuclear reactor. She also eavesdropped on communications in and out of the South Korean Embassy in Ottawa. 

"Knowledge is power," said Liberal Member of Parliament Derek Lee. "When we as Canadians sit down with another country to negotiate an agreement, our negotiators must be possessed of as much knowledge as they can get their hands on. There isn't a country in the world that wouldn't do that." 

While the Canadians may be the new kids on the block when it comes to signals intelligence, the British virtually invented Sigint—hundreds of years before signals even came along. As early as the Elizabethan period, at least a few people in England knew that the Crown secretly read everyone's mail. In Stratford, a place of gentle green hills and straw thatched cottages along the Avon, William Shakespeare mentioned the practice in Henry V: 

'The King has note of all that they intend, 

By interception which they dream not of.'  

During World War II, the cryptanalytic activities of both Britain and the United States reached their zenith with the breaking of the Enigma, Fish, and Purple cipher machines. Following the war, to obscure the purpose of the burgeoning codebreaking organization, all references to cryptology were dropped from its name. Thus the Government Code and Cypher School became the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). About the same time, Bletchley Park was turned into a training center and GCHQ moved to the Cotswolds. There in Cheltenham, among medieval villages of stone cottages and endless fields, GCHQ built its sprawling headquarters in 1953. 

Among the differences between NSA and GCHQ for many years was unionization. Codebreakers, intercept operators, and others at GCHQ were allowed to join unions and even engage in brief work stoppages. That came to an end in 1984 when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used her iron fist to ban the unions. Much of the pressure to deunionize GCHQ came from the United States. 

On February 23, 1979, in a little-noticed action, a few hundred members of two civil service unions walked out for the day in support of a pay hike, briefly halting long-term analysis of intercepted messages. Then, in December 1979, after the Russians invaded Afghanistan, intercept operators began a "work-to-rule" action that limited the degree to which GCHQ could eavesdrop on Soviet tank and troop movements. Work-to-rule meant that intercept operators would do such things as tune their receiver to exactly the frequency of the desired target and not move from that frequency even though the signal might drift slightly to either side. 

Because NSA always has a sizable number of its own personnel working at GCHQ, the agency immediately became aware of the action. For the director of GCHQ, Sir Brian Tovey, it was extremely embarrassing. He ended up apologizing to NSA's then director, Bobby Ray Inman, for his agency's poor performance. "It made us look ridiculous," he recalled. "That was the turning point for me. From that time onwards, there was always an undercurrent of worry in some part of the office. It might be the radio [intercept] operators this week, the communications officers the next, and the computer operators the week after, but there was always something one was trying to contain." 

"Some sixty percent of the GCHQ radio [intercept] operators obeyed the call to work to rule," said one GCHQ supervisor, "creating such great damage to communications intelligence information that a major row erupted between GCHQ and NSA, with the latter threatening to terminate the UKUSA Agreement and withdraw all financial assistance and exchange of intelligence." He added, "NSA's faith in GCHQ's ability to deliver the goods was on the wane." 

Tovey saw trouble ahead. In the spring of 1981, he said, the unions made it "brutally clear" that they now regarded GCHQ as an attractive target—"a damn good place to hit." He added, "Hitting GCHQ doesn't hit the public, but it does bother and embarrass HMG [Her Majesty's Government]." 

In 1980, GCHQ intercept operators at one listening post had conducted a work-to-rule slowdown just at the time the Soviet Union was heavily involved in Afghanistan, causing a great deal of teeth-gnashing at NSA. As a result, Tovey wrote a classified letter to the staffers who had caused the disruption. "I was able to spell out the consequences of their action and the considerable anxiety it had caused to some of our customers and our major allies," he said. The most serious job action took place on March 8, 1981, during a critical period when there were numerous major international events taking place. These included the assassination attempt on President Reagan in Washington and a call for a national strike by the Solidarity union in Poland. At GCHQ, the unions called for a one-day strike and then mounted "selective disruptive action" at a number of the agency's listening posts around the world. "The massive response to the strike call by intercepting personnel rendered a number of the intelligence gathering stations completely inoperable for more than a week," said one GCHQ supervisor. "This lost not only the current intelligence available through interception, but deprived the organization of information necessary for the reception of valuable information for months ahead." 

According to Tovey, it became essential that actions at one of those monitoring stations be halted immediately "for the most vital security reasons." But when a senior GCHQ official pleaded with a union official to call off the work stoppage at that station, explaining in vague terms the nature of the threat, the union official replied bluntly, "You are telling me where I'm hurting Mrs. Thatcher." 

Thus when Tovey told the NSA director shortly after the incident that he was going to get the unions banned, Inman smiled and exclaimed, "That's marvelous." "We do not interfere with each other," said Tovey. "But having said that, the Americans could not be unconcerned if a major partner fell down on the job. We noticed a reluctance to enter into work-sharing and we read this as a message. It was the beginning of a reluctant feeling that 'Oh Lord, we don't know whether we can rely on the Brits.'.. . They had always been puzzled by the presence of unions. They have a cast-iron organization at the NSA. If anyone goes on strike there they get the sack. We used to have to tell them: 'We've had to drop this because of industrial unrest; could you pick it up for us?' The Americans found this bizarre." 

Arguing to Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee that unions should  be banned at GCHQ, Tovey asserted that their past actions had put "unfair stress on the Americans" and that the tempo of union disruptions was increasing. Once Thatcher approved the recommendation, buff-brown envelopes appeared on employees' desks explaining the order. "Some people went white," said one GCHQ worker, "some people started to giggle. You could say they were in a mild state of clinical shock." To protest the action, the Trades Union Congress paid for an advertisement in a London tabloid. "At GCHQ," it said, "the Government listens to everyone except the people who work there." 

The worry that NSA might someday distance itself from GCHQ has had a major impact on the British organization, never more than during the 1982 war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. At that point, the British government realized how much they relied on NSA for help with Sigint. "Dependence is total," said one official. One report indicated that NSA broke the Argentine code and that as much as 98 percent of the intelligence on Argentina's naval and military movements came from NSA. "We can ask the Americans to do things," said one former official, "but we cannot compel them. There may be targets they don't want to cover." 

As a result of this worry, the British government in 1983 gave secret approval for a massive undertaking, the development of their own Sigint satellite, codenamed Zircon. GCHQ originally recommended the project to the Ministry of Defence as far back as the early 1970s, following the success of NSA's Rhyolite program. But they were constantly turned down until 1983, after the Falklands War. 

Originally scheduled for a 1988 launch, Zircon was to be disguised as a military communications satellite and was to focus primarily on Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Not everyone, however, was happy with the decision. A few dismissed it as "macho politics," simply an attempt to keep up with the United States in an endless Sigint space race. Worse, the Ministry of Defense kept the entire $700 million project hidden from Parliament. 

But the costs soon doomed Zircon. The satellite itself bore an enormous price tag, and it was estimated that yearly maintenance requirements would have added about another $150 million to the project. "The UK simply isn't able to afford that coverage," said Lieutenant General Derek Boorman, the chief of Defence Intelligence. Instead, Britain agreed to contribute money to the United States in return for a sort of time-share arrangement with a new generation of NSA's Sigint satellites, codenamed Magnum. Under the new agreement, London would be allowed to "task" the satellites on targets of interest to the United Kingdom for up to one-third of the time. 

The first Magnum was launched in 1994 with an eavesdropping dish 160 feet in diameter. Now that they were part owners of the Sigint satellite, senior British officials began taking a closer interest in Cheltenham. That same year Prime Minister John Major paid his first visit to GCHQ, and early the next year the Queen herself and the Duke of Edinburgh were given a tour. At the time, the agency employed 6,228 people at its headquarters, with about 3,000 more at overseas listening posts, and had a budget of about $900 million. 

By 2001, GCHQ was busy constructing a new $500 million space-age complex to replace its headquarters buildings. Nicknamed "the doughnut," the circular structure was being built on a 176-acre site in Benhall, a section of Cheltenham about four miles from the old headquarters in Oakley. Plans called for the bombproof, four-story signals intelligence center to be seventy feet high and more than 600 feet in diameter—easily big enough to hold London's Royal Albert Hall. In addition to rooms full of receivers and computers, the doughnut would also resemble a small town with banks, shops, a health center, a gym— and a small pond in the center "hole" bordered by dish-shaped antennas. Surrounding the revolutionary building would be spaces for 1,750 cars and 200 bikes, arranged in concentric rings.

Auditors have recently warned that the doughnut's costs appear to be on the verge of spiraling out of control. Nevertheless, other GCHQ facilities are also planned for the site, including a science park of hightech buildings. It was hoped that the project would be completed by 2003. At that time, the old headquarters would be turned into a 500- house development with a supermarket, video shop, and takeout restaurant.

Despite the end of the Cold War, the dawn of the new century, and the many internal and external changes at GCHQ and NSA, the secret relationship between the two partners promises to remain as close as it was sixty years ago, during the darkest days of World War II. Addressing a group in NSA's Friedman Auditorium in the fall of 1999, director Hayden said he had just returned from a visit with his counterparts in England. Then he added enthusiastically: "We must go back to our roots with GCHQ." 

Like GCHQ, the Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) rose from the ashes of World War II, during which its Central Bureau played a large role in eavesdropping on the Japanese and attacking their codes. Following the war, a number of listening posts were built, and Australian intercept operators worked jointly with employees of GCHQ at listening posts in Hong Kong and Singapore. 

Today DSD is headquartered at Victoria Barracks, a modern glass government facility on St. Kilda Road in Melbourne. Compared with NSA  and GCHQ, DSD is tiny, with about 500 civilians, most of whom work at headquarters, and about 500 military intercept operators. Despite the agency's small size, because of Australia's strategic location it is able to contribute considerable signals intelligence on its neighbors to NSA and the other UKUSA partners. According to Australian intelligence documents, this material has included such things as Japanese, South Korean, and Pakistani diplomatic traffic, rebel communications in southern Africa, and border conflicts between Iran and Iraq. For years DSD was also able to provide early tip offs on French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. This allowed the United States to position aircraft and naval vessels to monitor the detonations and determine the bombs' yield and other technical details. 

Next to Victoria Barracks is a boxy, windowless building that looks like a warehouse for dry goods. In fact, for many years it was a major listening post for eavesdropping on China and western Russia. In the early 1980s, many British and Australian intercept operators were pulled out of Hong Kong and the antennas became largely remoted. Giant dishes automatically collected the signals, which were in turn retransmitted by satellite to Melbourne, nearly 5,000 miles away. The listening post's cover name was the Joint Telecommunications Unit Melbourne. 

Finally, the newest and smallest member of the UKUSA club is New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), formally established in 1977. During World War II, as the Japanese war machine pushed rapidly across the Pacific, gobbling up islands, New Zealand quickly built a number of signals intelligence stations, which contributed to the British and American Sigint effort. They were controlled from Defence House, a seven-story building on Stout Street in Wellington. 

After the war, the intercept service was abandoned and New Zealand contributed some members to Australia's postwar codebreaking and eavesdropping organization, the Defence Signals Bureau. Nevertheless, a small listening post was built on a bleak volcanic plateau at Waiouru in the central part of North Island. Eventually named the New Zealand Combined Signals Organisation, it contributed to the Sigint effort during the war in Vietnam. 

Today, the headquarters for the GCSB occupies the top floors of the Freyberg Building, opposite Parliament, in Wellington. Concentrating mostly on the Pacific Rim and small island nations, it has a high frequency listening post at Tangimoana Beach, about 225 miles north of Wellington. A satellite interception facility was opened at Waihopai; it targets, among other things, diplomatic communications to and from Japanese embassies around the Pacific. In 2001 GCSB employed about 200 people and had a budget of about $20 million (Australian). Its director was Warren Tucker, who joined the agency in 1982 and before that served as liaison to NSA. 

With the admission of New Zealand's GCSB in 1977, the major English-speaking nations of the world were joined in a highly secret agreement to eavesdrop on the rest of the world, friend as well as foe. Over the years, the UKUSA partnership would develop into a unique supranational body, complete with its own laws, oaths, and language, all hidden from public view. As a sovereign nation has a body of laws, so UKUSA has a body of secrets. The International Regulations on Sigint govern the actions of the multinational cyberspies, from the wording of their indoctrination oaths to the format of their intercept forms to their unique cryptospeak of codewords and covernames. 

Once those rules were firmly in place in the 1970s, NSA set out to weld the individual members together into a virtual nation, with Crypto City as its capital. It did this by building a massive computer network, codenamed Platform, which tied together fifty-two separate computer systems belonging to all the members around the world. The focal point, or "host environment," for the massive network was NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Finally, to do away with formal borders, a software package was developed to turn the partners' worldwide Sigint operation into a unified whole. Agencies would be able to submit targets to one another's listening posts and, likewise, everyone would be allowed to share in the take—to dip their electronic ladles into the vast caldron of intercepts and select what they liked. The software package that established this was codenamed Echelon. 

During the 1980s, fax machines and computers began to proliferate. More and more information once sealed tightly in envelopes began zipping through the ether. Everything from private letters to tax returns to contracts to business negotiations to foreign unclassified military and diplomatic messages suddenly went from opaque to transparent. All spies needed was steel nets to catch the signals as they plunged from the international communications satellites (INTELSATs). Perched like chattering magpies in geostationary orbits above the earth, the seventeen INTELSAT satellites provide telephone, fax, e-mail, and other international communications to over 200 countries and territories around the world. The system is managed by the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, a Washington, D.C.—based cooperative. "We link the world's telecommunications networks together," says the company. 

As commercial earth stations were built around the world to transmit and receive millions of private messages and telephone calls to and from the INTELSATs, NSA and its partners quietly began constructing mirror 340 sites hidden nearby. Massive ninety-foot dishes resting on thick cement pedestals, they looked like great silver chalices containing offerings to the gods. The first ones were built in an isolated valley in Sugar Grove, West Virginia (using parts from the failed Moonbounce project); on a vast, restricted Army firing range in Yakima, Washington; and at the edge of a Cornish cliff near Bude, England. As more INTELSATs began dotting the distant skies, the UKUSA partnership began building more ground stations to eavesdrop on them. 

By the end of the 1980s, the revolution was in full swing. Wholesale satellite eavesdropping would change the nature of signals intelligence forever. "We grew so fast in the '80's we got buried," recalled Robert L. Prestel, who took over as deputy director in 1990. 

Next...
CHAPTER ELEVEN MUSCLE 

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a journalist, I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of artistic, cultural, historic, religious and political issues. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Copyrighted material can be removed on the request of the owner.