Part 12: Body of Secrets...Soul

CHAPTER THIRTEEN 

SOUL 

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As mysterious as the agency itself are the tens of thousands of nameless and faceless people who populate NSA's secret city. According to various agency statistics, the average employee is forty-three years old, with between fourteen and eighteen years of experience. About 59 percent of the workers are male and 10 percent are members of racial and ethnic minorities. Sixty-three percent of the workforce has less than ten years' experience; 13 percent are in the military (including four generals and admirals), 27 percent are veterans, 3.3 percent are retired military, and 5 percent are disabled. In addition to civilian and military employees, 2,300 contractors are employed full-time at the agency. 

If NSA were considered as a corporation, then, in terms of dollars spent, floor space occupied, and personnel employed, it would rank in the top 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies. In 1993 NSA spent over $9.4 million on air travel; more than 90 percent of the flights originated at nearby Baltimore-Washington International Airport. On behalf of NSA employees residing in Maryland, NSA paid approximately $65 million in 1993 state income taxes on gross salaries totaling approximately $930 million. 

But beyond the numbing statistics, the men and women who disappear through the double steel fences every day are both extraordinary and ordinary. They constitute the largest collection of mathematicians and linguists in the country and possibly the world, and they are civil servants angry over how far they must park from their building. Some spend their day translating messages in Sinhalese (spoken in Sri Lanka), or delving into the upper reaches of combinatorics and Galois theory. 

One woman knows everything on earth about tires. "She's known as the 'tire lady,' " said one of NSA's customers in the intelligence community. "She's the tire specialist. Embargoed airplanes need tires and when you're trying to embargo somebody it's the little things that take on major importance. If somebody is shipping jet fighter tires to Iran you want to know what kind of fighter they go on." 

Most NSA staffers could be anyone's neighbor. Some wear suits to work every day, but most dress less formally. "There is no dress code at all," complained one fashion-conscious former Russian linguist, who called NSA a "haven for geeks and nerds." "I saw a guy wearing yellow pants, yellow shirt, and yellow sweater vest," she said. "A lot of guys don't dress that well." 

When he has time, Brent Morris performs magic at his children's school in Columbia, Maryland. At NSA, he is a senior cryptologic mathematician. Morris got hooked on magic at the age of five when he saw Buffalo Bob perform a trick on the Howdy Doody television show. In high school he learned the perfect card shuffle while studying the connection between math and magic. At NSA, Morris used the perfect shuffle to help develop a method of random and sequential accessing of computer memories. Later the shuffle helped him work out a method of sorting computer information. Morris also served as the executive secretary of the NSA Scientific Advisory Board. 

By day Eileen Buckholtz works in NSA's Telecommunications and Computer Services Organization. But by night she is "Rebecca York," the author of a series of romantic suspense novels published by Harlequin. Her co-author is married to another NSAer. And Frederick Bulinski of the agency's Programs and Resources Organization was inducted into the Polka Music Hall of Fame, has released eight albums, and organizes "Polkamotion by the Ocean," a popular yearly festival in Ocean City, Maryland. 

One unique study, done by longtime NSA employee Gary L. Grantham, examined the character, styles, traits, and personalities of NSA's management. "The results show that the personality of NSA leadership is substantially different as a group from the general population of the United States," he concluded. "NSA management is more introverted in dealing with situations, more impersonal in making judgments, and more likely to come to conclusions about their environment than is the general population." Grantham explained that the reason that NSA managers were more shy and impersonal had largely to do with "the highly technical mission of the organization and the large numbers of college-trained employees and those with military background where similar personality traits are found." 

The study, "Who Is NSA," was conducted as part of a program at the National War College. NSA granted Grantham access to the results of a test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which was given to NSA senior executives and supervisors. The tests indicated that almost two-thirds of the officials were introverted in the way they dealt with "the outer world." "This contrasts markedly with the general population in the U.S.," said the study, "where extraverting [sic] types make up about 75 percent." NSA officials were also far more "thinking" oriented than the outside world, which was more "feeling" in its professional relationships. "The average NSA manager is more introverted than the general public, much more intuitive, more thinking, and more judging." "You can always tell an NSA extrovert," goes one old agency joke. "He looks at your shoe tips instead of his." 

"The great predominance of introverts (64%) means that most NSA managers have greater powers of concentration," the study concluded, "and go deeply into their work by focusing on the underlying concepts and ideas in the pursuit of real understanding. They may be reluctant to consider their work finished and get rid of it. They are not likely to be affected by a lack of praise or encouragement since their focus is on their inner world. If they assume that everyone around them has the same attitude about the world as they do, they may fail to recognize the needs of the extraverts around them for praise. By the same token, the introverts' inner-directed view of the world is often confusing to those around them, including other introverts." 

Finally, the study suggested a secret city run by a cold, aloof, detached management. "The predominance of thinking types among managers at NSA is significant in that their preferred way of judging is impersonal, logical, and analytic. While that approach is decidedly more useful in solving task-oriented problems, the people side of managing will suffer. Thinking types expect to be recognized for their competence. Their rewards are responsibility, titles, and raises. They may forget, or not be aware, that one-fourth of their subordinates are feeling types who occasionally need praise and need to be appreciated for who they are, doing a job. According to one observer, 'a "T" [thinking type] thinks that if you haven't been fired, you should know you are doing a good job.' 

"The overwhelming preference among NSA managers for judging reflects a choice for system and order. They are organizers who thrive on making decisions, schedules, and programs, and are disconcerted by disruptions or unplanned occurrences. They are less tolerant, less open minded and less flexible than their perceptive co-workers who often put off making a decision because they are not sure they have enough information. The potential for conflict is great." 

For many, if not most, the initial excitement of working in the nation's largest and most secret spy agency gradually gives way to routine. "From my perspective," said Tami McCaslin, associate editor of the NSA Newsletter, "isolated in the depths of the Newsletter office, I sometimes fail to see how the rest of the world can be so intrigued by this (in my mind) typical government bureaucracy." 

As diverse as the workforce is, there is one thing they all have in common: you won't find them talking about their jobs, even when they're sharing a meal in the cafeteria with someone from the next office. The operative rule is "Don't tell, don't ask" about work. The very first subject addressed in the NSA Handbook, given to all new residents of the secret city, is the "practice of anonymity." "Perhaps one of the first security practices with which new NSA personnel should become acquainted is the practice of anonymity. . . ." says the report. "Anonymity means that NSA personnel are encouraged not to draw attention to themselves nor to their association with this Agency. NSA personnel are also cautioned neither to confirm nor deny any specific questions about NSA activities directed to them by individuals not affiliated with the Agency." Finally, the handbook warns: "The ramifications of the practice of anonymity are rather far reaching." 

Those seeking employment with NSA are told little about the actual work of the organization. "It has become commonplace in recent years to describe NSA as super-secret—'the hush-hush Agency,' " said an editorial in NSA's highly secret NSA Technical Journal. "NSA, with missions so interwoven in the fabric of national security, necessarily has had to forgo all custom of public statement, to eschew the press releases which over the years might build an inviting public image and make its worth known to the American people. Though mindful of the dictates of security, NSA knows too that security can have an adverse effect on recruitment—the lifeline of any institution. Indeed, so little can be said that the acceptance of employment with NSA is virtually an act of faith." 

Concerned over the failure to reach recruits with critical high-tech abilities because of the agency's obsession with secrecy, the editorial's author suggested getting the following message out to the scientific academic community: "We in NSA comprise a scientific and technological community that is unique in the United States, unique in the western world and perhaps unique in the entire world. We work on problems which no other agency works on. We develop and utilize devices which are in advance of those that have been developed or are utilized by any other agency or any organization in the entire United States. We are confronted with an ever-changing challenge of greater complexity, of greater scope, and of correspondingly greater depth and difficulty than any other changing challenge on the rapidly evolving frontier of science and technology. If you can qualify, you will find NSA a stimulating and rewarding place to work. If you are interested, we can tell you a little more but not much more. One of the qualifications is faith." Still nervous even over that bland description, the editorial added, "Before you send it—better check it out with Security." 

More recently, the agency has made a few reluctant public references to cryptology and signals intelligence. "Your challenge," says one brochure directed at mathematicians, "is to use algebra, number theory, combinatorics, statistics, even cryptology and other skills to create—or break—nearly impenetrable codes and ciphers." Another said, "The challenge is to use probability, statistics, Fourier analysis, Galois theory, stochastic processes and other techniques to outwit the world experts in creating or breaking codes and ciphers." But beyond that, no more is said. 

"We're looking for those special few," goes one NSA recruitment pitch, "who are up to this ultimate test." Some are hired while still in college, through a minority scholarship program known as the Undergraduate Training Program. The students work at NSA during summers, then receive full-time offers upon graduation. The program is highly competitive. Of the 600 to 800 high school students who apply each year, only a small percentage are selected. In 1999 there were seventy-nine participants attending a variety of schools, including Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Cornell. Not everyone, however, is happy about the program. "It is appalling," complained one employee, "to see such a blatant case of reverse discrimination being sponsored by the Agency." 

Other opportunities for those in college are offered by the agency's Cooperative Education Program, which allows about four dozen students to spend their college years alternating semesters between full-time work and full-time study. In 1997, about 80 percent of the graduates chose to remain with the agency. "Our recruiting strategy has historically been built on excitement of the mission," said Deputy Director for Services Terry Thompson in 1999. "And that's why our Co-op programs are so vital to us because when we get people in here before they make the big career decision when they graduate, and find out about the excitement of the mission." 

Traditionally, prospective employees were marched in groups through the agency, like draftees, for numerous interviews, tests, and polygraph exams. Only at the completion of the process—it normally took about seven months—would some of those prospects be matched to a particular job and offered employment. But by then many had already accepted better-paying jobs from private industry, and the agency was forced to dig deeper in the pool. Those not called would remain in limbo. 

Stung by tough competition paying top dollar for information technology personnel, the agency in 1999 initiated a streamlined hiring process based more on private industry than on the local draft board. Only a few schools were targeted, so that strong relationships with them could be established. Students were given more detailed job descriptions than the agency had offered in the past, as well as a better explanation of the benefits of working at the cutting edge of technology. A private firm was hired to scan resumes into an NSA-only Internet site. The company then helped match the resumes to specific jobs. An e-mail address was created (njobs@fggm.osis.gov) for the submission of resumes. Finally, in order to accelerate the process, initial screening was done over the telephone. 

Those selected are then brought to headquarters for interviews; they undertake a battery of standardized tests and are assigned NSA "buddies" to help sell them on the agency and the surrounding community. The exams are designed to measure a person's general knowledge as well as his or her "cipher brain"—the special abilities needed for the tedious, sometimes mind-numbing, work of a cryptanalyst or other cryptologic staffer. Although codebreaking and codemaking are what most people think of in terms of occupations at NSA, "they undoubtedly represent a declining percentage of the Agency's work force," said a recent internal document. This results from growth in other areas, such as personnel and employee services. 

One math major who recently went through the process, hoping to become one of the agency's 600 mathematicians, found it "very humanely organized." He was fingerprinted and asked to fill out a thick "Statement of Personal History" containing detailed questions concerning addresses, travel, and activities over the past ten years. "Getting through that required me to think plenty about whether I wanted to go through it all," he said. 

Next, he was invited down to Fort Meade, assigned an escort, and paraded through a gauntlet of interviews. The escort, a fellow mathematician, took on the buddy role, answering questions in a candid, off-the-record manner, and putting in occasional plugs for the agency. The candidate was surprised to find that every official who interviewed him was very familiar with his resume, down to the marks on his transcripts. "I've never had that happen before," he said. 

His first interview was with the head of the mathematicians' training unit, who described the three-year program the applicant would have to complete, beginning with a long course at the National Cryptologic School. He and about forty other newly hired students, some just out of college and some with Ph.D's, would get a quick review of higher algebra followed by deep involvement in the cryptologic aspects of mathematics. Normally the course work would involve two hours of lectures every day, followed by six hours of study. Lining one wall of the official's office were photos of the three classes of mathematician trainees then in the pipeline. 

After a candidate undergoes interviews and submits a variety of paperwork, such as letters of reference, his or her name is sent to the twenty-four-member Mathematicians Hiring Committee. During one of the committee's monthly meetings, the person is discussed and voted on. The views of the escorts are never solicited nor are they questioned on their conversations with the candidate. Results of the vote, yea or nay, are immediately sent out by e-mail. 

Those who make the final cut—in recent years, about 100 of the 2,000 or so people who applied annually—are then given a conditional offer of employment. Next they begin their processing at the agency's four-story Airport Square Building a few miles away in the FANX compound. There, the new recruits spend their first day filling out forms and getting a medical checkup. 

The next hurdle is the intensive background investigation conducted on all prospective employees by the Defense Security Service. Known as an SSBI (for Single-Scope Background Investigation; it is also known within NSA as a Special Background Investigation), it includes a "National Agency Check"—a check of all federal investigative agencies for derogatory information. Birth records and citizenship are verified. Finally, education, employment, credit files, and local court records are checked for the previous ten years. A neighborhood search for dirt is also conducted at addresses listed for the past decade. 

Rob Fuggetta, who lives in Odenton, Maryland, near NSA, recalled when a government investigator knocked on his door in the mid-1980s and began quizzing him about his neighbor, a high school student looking for a summer job at NSA. The questions started off routine, he said, but soon turned very personal. "Do you know if he's a homosexual? Does he use drugs or alcohol? Does he go to church frequently? What can you tell me about his home life? Does he get along with his parents?" 

"Appropriate character" is what NSA was looking for, according to Bill Shores, in charge of NSA's college recruitment program at the time. That someone is homosexual or a drug user, per se, "does not mean he or she can't come to work for NSA," he said, but "a person that has something to hide would not be a good security risk." 

NSA officials are fighting a new proposal by the Defense Security Service to abandon neighborhood in-person visits in favor of simple telephone calls. The DSS argues that it can no longer afford such costly and time-consuming procedures. Pointing out that NSA is only one of its customers, DSS officials say that they must conduct more than 250,000 background investigations of government and contractor personnel each year, leading to tremendous backlogs. At the same time, the agency is behind on tens of thousands of five-year updates required for the 3 million federal employees and contractors who hold active security clearances. Thus, by 2000, DSS's total backlog was a whopping 900,000 investigations. On top of those problems, DSS personnel have been cut back about 40 percent in recent years, from 4,300 employees in the mid1980s to 2,500 in 1998. 

A survey done in 1999 discovered that 94 percent of the background investigations DSS conducted for NSA were incomplete and not up to federal standards. That same year, a routine reinvestigation polygraph examination resulted in the arrest of Daniel King, a Navy petty officer working for NSA. King, an eighteen-year veteran, was arrested on October 28 and charged with espionage for allegedly confessing to mailing a computer disk to the Russian embassy five years earlier. The disk allegedly contained super sensitive details on NSA's undersea cable tapping operations against the Russians. 

After the SSBI is completed, the results are sent back to NSA for evaluation. 

The next phase takes them down a narrow passageway to an area of small offices that sends shivers down the backs of most candidates: Polygraph Services. Within the tiny beige offices, new, computerized polygraph machines sit on wood-grain desktops and are attached to monitors that display the recruit's physiological responses in a variety of formats. Among the data recorded, according to an NSA document, are the individual's "respiration, electro-dermal responses, pulse rate, pulse amplitude, vascular volume, capillary volume, vascular pressure, capillary pressure, and bodily movement as recorded by pneumograph, galvanograph, cardiosphygmograph, plethysmograph and cardio activity monitors, which are sections of polygraph instruments." Watching the graphics form sharp peaks and deep valleys is one of the agency's several dozen certified examiners. Many of the questions they ask come from the results of the SSBI. 

On the other side of the desk, the applicant sits in a large, heavily padded, executive-type swivel chair. Electrodes are attached to the fingers; rubber tubes are strapped around the chest; and a bulky blood pressure cuff fits around the upper arm. What the examiners are looking for are significant changes from the subject's baseline chart. These may be as dramatic as a total cessation of breathing or a major increase in blood pressure—or as subtle as a slight decrease in skin resistance. 

The Armed Forces Security Agency began the polygraph program in May 1951 with the hiring of six examiners at annual salaries of $6,400. The program was introduced because the agency was growing so quickly that background investigations could not be completed fast enough for the hiring program. More than 1,000 people had been hired but could not be cleared until their background investigation was finished, which because of the Korean War was taking from nine to eighteen months. By 1953 NSA was giving polygraphs to all job applicants. The questioning was originally conducted in a well-guarded, ominous-looking building at 1436 U Street, NW, in Washington, before the office moved to the Operations Building and then to FANX. 

The polygraph remains the most dreaded part of NSA's admission ritual. "Polygraph! The word alone is enough to set your nerves on edge," began one article on the machine in NSA's in-house newsletter. It is also, by far, the most important part of that ritual. According to a study at NSA, 78 percent of all information used in evaluating an applicant as a security risk comes from the polygraph reports. Only 22 percent of the information is based on the background investigations. 

From July 1983 to June 1984 the agency administered a total of 11,442 examinations. Of those, 4,476 were given to job applicants. From that group, 1,875 dropped out voluntarily for a variety of reasons. Of the remaining 2,601, 793 were rejected by the agency's Applicant Review Panel, composed of personnel, security, and medical managers. As an example of the power of the box, a whopping 90 percent of those (714 of 793) were booted because of bad polygraph results. During the first half of 1984 a total of 1,202 contractors were strapped to the machine, and 167 were shown the door after leaving the polygraph room. 

The polygraph sessions earned a black eye during the 1950s and early 1960s because of the agency's heavy dependence on the EPQ, or embarrassing personal question. EPQs are almost inevitably directed toward intimate aspects of a person's sex life and bear little relationship to his or her honesty or patriotism. Following a congressional investigation and an internal crackdown, the personal questions became somewhat tamer but abuses have occasionally continued. 

"The worst experience of my life," said one former NSA Russian linguist, "was the lie-detector test." After starting out with questions about shoplifting, the polygraph operator quickly turned to sex, asking if she was into bestiality. "If you have sex, they want to know how much. If you have too much sex, they get scared. If you don't have sex, they think you're gay. At the time I wasn't dating anybody and they kept wanting to know, 'Why don't you have a boyfriend?' " That test was given in 1993. More recently, NSA claims, the questions have been less intrusive. 

Contractor employees were first required to take polygraphs in 1957. And in 1982, following a damaging spy scandal at Britain's GCHQ, military personnel assigned to NSA were first required to be strapped to the box. The military entrance polygraph is conducted by the military services on military assignees before their acceptance for a position at NSA and is directed toward counterintelligence questions. 

At the same time, a five-year reinvestigation polygraph examination, which also focuses on counterintelligence-related questions, was introduced for all employees. Still another polygraph program, the special access examination, was instituted to test employees about to be assigned to especially sensitive programs within NSA. Those tested under this program are asked both counterintelligence and, under certain circumstances, "suitability"—personal—questions. 

Finally, again in 1982, NSA instituted a dreaded policy of unscheduled "aperiodic" counterintelligence polygraph examinations. One purpose of these tests is to look for spies; another is to look for leakers. According to a memo from the director, civilian employees who refused to consent faced "termination of employment." The agency, said one senior NSA official, asked the Justice Department to investigate about four leaks a year during the first half of the 1980s. 

Among the topics covered during NSA's counterintelligence polygraph examination are the following. 

• knowledge of, participation in, or commission of acts of espionage or sabotage against the United States 

• knowledge of, approaches to, or giving or selling any classified information or material to unauthorized persons 

• unauthorized or unreported foreign contacts 

The idea of suddenly being called from an office, strapped to a machine, and asked whether you have been selling secrets to the Russians or leaking information to the press might leave "the work force at NSA ... shocked," said Philip T. Pease, the chief of the Office of Security at NSA. As a result, employees were called to the Friedman Auditorium for a series of town meetings during which the new procedures were discussed. 

Under the aperiodic exam program, the agency, without notice, pulled 1,770 people into the polygraph rooms in 1983. Of those, 1,699 were thanked and sent on their way. Seventy-one, however, were asked to come back for a further interview, which cleared all but four. They returned for a third round of drilling but were eventually also allowed to return to work, presumably a few pounds lighter. According to the chief of the Polygraph Division, Norman Ansley, the problems ranged across the board. One individual had kept a classified manual at his residence for several years. Another person knew of the improper destruction of crypto keying material. Still another described a suspicious approach by foreign personnel but had failed to report the incident at the time it took place. 

After the test, the examiner reviews the individual's charts and makes a final decision on the results. "NSR" (no significant response) means that there were no unresolved issues. "SPR" (specific physiological response) signifies that the individual reacted consistently to a specific question. "INC" (inconclusive) means that the test results could not be interpreted. And "incomplete" signifies that the test was not finished. When issues are unresolved, the individual is requested to return to the box for retesting. 

Once completed, the examiner's report is forwarded to quality control for an independent review of accuracy and analysis and to ensure that all issues have been covered. From there it travels to the Clearance Division for adjudication. The polygraph examiner does not make any clearance decisions. His or her sole purpose is to verify the validity of the information being provided during the interview and to resolve any matters that are causing the person difficulty in passing the test. 

A unique insight into the NSA polygraph program comes from an analysis of 20,511 applicants between 1974 and 1979. Of those, 695 (3.4 percent) admitted to the commission of a felony. In nearly all cases the perpetrator had gone undetected. The admissions included murder, armed robbery, forcible rape, burglary, arson, embezzlement, hit-and-run driving with personal injury, thefts of expensive items or large amounts of money, smuggling, and wholesale selling of illegal drugs. 

One person who applied to NSA proved to be a fugitive who, during questioning under the polygraph, admitted firing a rifle into his estranged wife's home in an attempt to murder her. Another confessed to firing his shotgun at six people, and hitting all of them. He had been charged with attempted murder but not tried because of lack of evidence. Still another told of setting fire to the trailer in which his ex-wife and their child lived. A veteran admitted to a polygraph operator that while in Vietnam he had murdered a young girl. On a later occasion he stabbed a stranger in the face with a knife in an argument over some beer. And an applicant for an engineering position—who was employed as an engineer by another government agency—blurted out that he had shot and wounded his second wife and that his present wife was missing under unusual circumstances, which he would not explain. He also suddenly declared that his engineering degree was phony. 

Even espionage has turned up during polygraph examinations. One applicant with access to Top Secret/Codeword intelligence who was about to retire from the military described making several visits to the Soviet embassy to make arrangements to defect to the Soviet Union. The Russians took copies of his classified documents and when they found out he had applied to NSA for employment, they encouraged him to continue. 

Another applicant, who had access to classified information while in the military, confessed that he would sell classified information to a foreign intelligence service if he could get enough money. And one person looking for a job at NSA eventually admitted that much of his background was falsified and that he had worked as a scientific adviser to the chief of a foreign military intelligence agency. 

Most significantly, the NSA study indicated serious questions about highly cleared military personnel assigned to NSA's Central Security Service. At the time, service members were not subject to the polygraph. During the five-year period of the survey, 2,426 of these SCI-cleared military personnel applied for employment with NSA as civilians. Of that number, thirteen admitted that either they themselves or someone they knew had been involved in espionage. Another twenty-five told of passing classified information to Communists or terrorists. 

In the early 1990s NSA became the first intelligence or defense agency to completely computerize its polygraph program—the first major change in the art of polygraphy since 1940. According to NSA officials, the computerized polygraph equipment was found to be more accurate than conventional methods because it could record signals at maximum sensitivity. The computer also allows the examiner to change how the data are displayed on the screen without changing the base data, thus protecting the validity of the test. 

The agency is currently working on ways to almost completely eliminate all human involvement in the polygraph process. In the near future an Orwellian computer, programmed with an individual's history, will ask the questions, analyze the answers, and decide whether a person is lying or telling the truth. 

In 1991 the Office of Security Services, working with the Mathematics Branch of the Research and Sigint Technology Division, issued a contract aimed at elevating the computer from simply a passive display to an active analyst. The lead contractor on the project, Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, was able to develop a system called Polygraph Assisted Scoring System (PASS) using a briefcase-sized AXCITON computerized polygraph. Unlike evaluation by humans, which sometimes took days or even weeks to produce a final decision, the computerized procedure finishes within two or three minutes of the exam. Using both a history of the individual's past tests and his or her own physiological makeup, the computer comes up with a statistical probability concerning the meaning of test results. 

Although with the PASS system examiners would still make the final determination, their future does not look bright. Early testing indicates that computerized analysis is more accurate and produces fewer inconclusive results than human-administered tests. According to one NSA document, "In the near future, it may even be possible for the computer to ask the test questions—eliminating any possibility of the examiner's affecting the test results." 

But despite the growing dependence on the polygraph, the box is far from infallible, as Norman Ansley, chief of NSA's Polygraph Division during the 1980s, once admitted. Asked whether someone addicted to drugs and alcohol could beat the box, his answer was "Possibly," if that person "had practiced dissociation by thinking of something else." Which is precisely why many both inside and outside government distrust the machines. "Polygraphing has been described as a 'useful, if unreliable' investigative tool," said the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1999. Given such questionable data, the panel asked CIA director George J. Tenet and FBI director Louis J. Freeh to assess "alternative technologies to the polygraph." The newest agency to use the polygraph is the Department of Energy, in its nuclear weapons labs. One scientist noted in the DoE employee newsletter that the expected error rate is about 2 percent. "In our situation," he said, "that's 100 innocent people out of 5,000 whose reputations and careers would be blemished." 

After the polygraph, NSA applicants undergo a battery of psychological tests to determine their suitability for both employment and access to the agency's highly classified materials. A clinical psychologist interviews 90 percent of all applicants. 

All the information obtained about an applicant from the polygraph, psychological testing, and the full field investigation is then put together and brought before NSA's Applicant Review Panel, comprising representatives from the personnel, medical, and security offices. The board examines each applicant on what the agency calls the "total person" principle and either gives the candidate a thumbs-up or refers the case to the director of personnel for a "We regret to inform you" letter. 

The second day of the two-day program for job applicants consists mainly of more briefings, including a security briefing and an unclassified operational briefing. A few of the most desirable prospects may get a tour of an operational area. This, however, requires the sanitizing of the entire area—everything classified must be removed—so it is seldom offered. 

Following their forty-eight hours at FANX, the recruits head back to school to finish their last semester and, in the meantime, to sweat out the background investigation. 

For many years, NSA security officials rated homosexuality near the top of its list of security problems to watch out for. 

In 1960, during the Eisenhower administration, irrational fear of homosexuality extended right into the Oval Office. "The Soviets seem to have a list of homosexuals," Attorney General William P. Rogers nervously told Eisenhower during a Top Secret National Security Council meeting. What really concerned him, he said, was "the possibility that there is an organized group of such people." Rogers, who would later become President Richard Nixon's secretary of state, apparently feared a worldwide conspiracy of homosexuals. "The Russians had entrapped one individual," he told the president, "who, in his confession, had stated that there was an international group of homosexuals." 

A month before, two NSA cryptologists had appeared before cameras on a stage in Moscow, asked for political asylum, and confessed the agency's deepest secrets like sinners at a revival meeting. It was the worst scandal in NSA's history. All evidence pointed clearly to ideology as the reason for William Martin and Bernon Mitchell's drastic action. But once it was discovered that one of the men had engaged in some barnyard experimentation as a youth, sexuality was quickly seized on as the real cause of the defections. According to documents obtained for Body of Secrets, the fear of homosexuals caused by the men's defection became pathological within the White House. The FBI secretly drew up a nationwide list of everyone it thought might be gay and, in a throwback to McCarthyism, Eisenhower ordered them blacklisted. 

At the National Security Council meeting described above, Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson was also concerned. He asked "how good a list we had of homosexuals." J. Edgar Hoover replied that his bureau "did have a list and that local authorities notified federal authorities when they obtained such information." Eisenhower then ordered a secret, systematic blacklisting of the listed individuals throughout the federal government. "Such lists," he said, "should be given to someone who would have responsibility for watching to ensure that such individuals were not employed by other Government agencies. Everyone who applied for a job should be fingerprinted. Then if you had a fingerprint and an indication that the individual had been rejected for such reasons as homosexuality, you would have a basis for preventing his future employment." Hoover agreed. "This was a useful idea." Eisenhower concluded the meeting with the comment, "It was difficult to get rid of such people once they were employed and that the time to catch them was when they came into the Government." 

The harsh attitude of the White House translated into a massive purge at NSA. Anyone who showed even the slightest gay tendencies, whether that person was actively homosexual or not, was out. Dozens were fired or forced to resign. The fear would last for decades. But by 2001, the attitude had changed considerably. The most striking example is the authorized formation within the walls of NSA of GLOBE, the group for gay, lesbian, and bisexual employees, whose regular monthly meetings, in NSA offices, are advertised in the NSA Newsletter. 

Less than a year after the Berlin Wall crumbled, the first post—Cold War conflict erupted. Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, U.S. and coalition forces launched the Desert Storm operation against Saddam Hussein. As the smoke began to clear, NSA director Studeman rated the performance of U.S. spy agencies during the conflict as mixed—except for what he called the excellent monitoring of sanction-busters. The principal problem, he said, was converting a former friend into an enemy almost overnight. "Clearly during the Iran-Iraq war," Studeman said, "we viewed Iraq as an ally. So, Iraq was an area where we didn't have a lot of basic collection, or a lot of idea of the depth and breadth of the Iraqi capabilities. We had that on a monitoring basis, but few would call it in depth knowledge of the target, the kind you would want to have if you go to war. We simply didn't have that." 

Studeman also said that because Saddam Hussein had been an intelligence partner, NSA was now at a disadvantage. "Having had about four years' or more worth of U.S. delivering intelligence to it with regard to Iran's conduct of the war, Iraq had a substantial knowledge and sensitivity of our capabilities in the area of imaging and other intelligence collection methods such as signals intelligence. If you go back to the fundamental principles of intelligence, we had already failed on the first count. That is, our security had been penetrated because we were dealing with this target to whom we had spent so many years displaying what our intelligence capabilities were. Add the fact that Iraq is a very secretive country itself and places a great premium on security, and you then have a target that is probably the most denial-and-deception oriented target that the U.S. has ever faced. It is a country that goes out of its way to create a large number of barriers to allowing any Western penetration of its capabilities and intentions." 

Especially troublesome during the war were such areas as intelligence "fusion"—bringing all the U.S. intelligence organizations together—and information management. A key problem for NSA was getting intelligence from the intercept operators to the codebreakers to the analysts to the commanders in desert tents in time for it to be useful. "Essentially, from the threat of the invasion of Kuwait in late July until the outbreak of hostilities on 15 January," Studeman said, "the time was spent creating the environment for collection, processing and analysis, and the connection between the national side of it and the theater side." 

As troops began boarding planes for the trip back home, Studeman looked ahead to the long decade leading up to the new century. "The world of the future is going to be an entirely different intelligence world," he said. By 1990 the fat years for NSA and its partners had come to an end. The Cold War had been won and it was time for the soldiers to return home. Suddenly a group that had known only growth was faced with cutbacks, budget slashing, and layoffs. 

At an intercept station in Marietta, Washington, the gray operations building lies abandoned and ghostlike. "While standing amongst the weeds, trash, and wrecked automobiles," said a former technician who decided to return for a visit, "my ears caught a faint sound coming from the remains of the ops building." Then he realized what he was hearing: "Several hundred rats rummaging through the piles of garbage." 

The powerful wave of Cold War fears that decades earlier had swept listening posts onto remote mountaintops and Arctic wastelands and into hidden valleys was now receding like a fast-falling tide. 

During deactivation ceremonies at Edzell, Scotland, near the elephant cage that had captured so many Soviet voices, the only sound was the piercing skirl of a lone bagpipe playing the haunting farewell "We're No' Awa' Tae Bide Awa'." 

At Key West, Florida, where reports had flashed to the White House during the Cuban missile crisis, a bugler sounded "Taps" and an NSA official watched the flag descend for the final time. 

In the Command Conference Room at Kamiseya, Japan, once the Navy's largest listening post, the commanding officer solemnly read from a classified message ordering the station's closure. 

At Skaggs Island, California; Karamürsel, Turkey; and dozens of other listening posts around the world, massive antennas were disassembled as quietly as they had been built. 

Once a forbidden and frozen land populated exclusively by eavesdroppers, the Alaskan island of Adak was put up for sale on the Internet. Satellite dishes, power plant, the Adak museum, schools, even the church were to go to the highest bidder. 

After seventy-nine years of operation, the last watch was stood at the naval listening post at Imperial Beach, California, near San Diego. 

Many listening posts not closed were virtually abandoned and turned into remotely controlled operations. At the small monitoring station atop Eckstein, a high German peak overlooking what was once Czechoslovakia, the intercept operators were replaced with automatic antennas controlled in Augsburg, more than five hours away by car. The only people left were a few security guards and several maintenance staff. 

The drawdown was not limited to NSA. In the far north, on the doorstep of the North Pole, several hundred people were cut from the Canadian listening post at Alert, the most important in the country. As with Eckstein and many other listening posts around the world, technology now permitted the station to be operated remotely from thousands of miles away. 

Across the Atlantic, Britain's GCHQ was going through the same post—Cold War trauma. In 1995, 900 of 6,000 jobs were ordered cut from the headquarters in Cheltenham over four years. Listening posts were also nailed shut, including the monitoring station at Culmhead in Devon, cutting 250 jobs. 

As at NSA, a number of GCHQ's overseas stations switched to remote control. Perched high on a cliff in Hong Kong, the joint British-Australian Chung Horn Kok listening post had long been one of the most important in the Far East. But all except a skeleton crew pulled out and moved thousands of miles away, to downtown Melbourne. There, in a windowless two-story gray stone building, intercept operators from Australia and New Zealand eavesdropped on Chinese and Russian communications picked up by British antennas in Hong Kong. "Most of the intercepted information went back to the NSA," said one of the staff. Among the key targets were Chinese testing of nuclear and other advanced weapons, and of space flight and military activities on the troublesome Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. Melbourne also monitored Russian communications from Vladivostok to the Russian base at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. 

But that all came to an end in the mid-1990s as Britain prepared for the return of Hong Kong to China. GCHQ officials ordered all its Hong Kong buildings razed to eliminate any chance that secrets would be compromised. By July 1997, when the handover took place, the windowless operations buildings had been reduced to rubble and the guard post was occupied by a vagrant sheltering from the rain. GCHQ did leave some equipment behind, however. Planted in the walls of the British army's former Prince of Wales barracks, which was turned over to the Chinese, was an assortment of listening devices. 

Some at GCHQ feared that if staff numbers dropped below 4,500, the agency would begin to seem minor in the eyes of NSA. "If we can stay at 4,500 we can be a vibrant and effective organization," said Brian Moore, a GCHQ staff officer. "If we don't stabilize at 4,500, there must be a question mark over GCHQ's core business." But for the first time an outsider—and one known for his budget cutting—was appointed director. David Omand, deputy undersecretary of policy at the Ministry of Defence, had made his name by championing a series of initiatives designed to cut costs and boost the efficiency of the U.K.'s armed forces. 

For many cryptologists, watching their secret world vanish into thin air was a difficult and painful experience. In the Texas hill country, just north of Austin, Robert Payne sat on his porch beneath an umbrella of stars. In the cool night, as fireflies danced, he puffed on a long cigar and took sips from a pale green coffee cup. "Who remembers what we did, how we did it, and why?" he once wrote. 

We were young sailors and marines, teenagers, sitting with headphones and typewriters copying and encrypting and decrypting and sending and receiving. Always on the alert, ever vigilant . . . Who understands the contributions we made in those far-flung outposts where we listened and watched through the endless days and nights of a very real Cold War? Who knows, for certain, what our work accomplished? I wonder what difference we made in the overall scheme of things. 

I sit here in the soft summer darkness and try to remember the names of all the places, and ships, and stations where we served. And I wonder if somewhere down the long, cold corridors of history, there will be monuments or memorials to these special ships and secret places that have served their country so well. . . . Places with strange sounding names, surrounded by fences, gates, armed Marines, and signs that warned "Authorized Personnel Only." Secret places with funny-looking antenna arrays called "giraffe" or "dinosaur cages." Places with names people have never heard. 

Another former intercept operator lamented, "Technology has progressed, so yesterday's way of doing business is no longer today's way. ... The circle tightens and grows smaller; our bases in the Philippines are gone. Keflavik, Iceland, is gone. San Vito, Italy, is gone. Galeta Island, Panama, is gone. Pyong Taek, Korea, is gone. Adak, Alaska, is gone." 

On the pages of the prestigious Naval Institute Press, a retired Navy cryptologist wrote that the Naval Security Group had outlived its usefulness and that the precious money used to run it would be better spent elsewhere in the Navy. The future looked so dim that Rear Admiral Isaiah Cole, the Security Group's director, was forced to reassure worried cryptologic veterans that their organization was not going to fold. "There will continue to be a Naval Security Group," he bravely asserted. But he had to admit that because of budget cuts "these are troubled times." 

As the Cold War passed, so did NSA's boom years. In the early 1980s, "people were stacked almost three deep," said one congressional aide. In 1983, NSA building projects (totaling $76 million, with another $212 million slated for the following year) accounted for almost 20 percent of the Pentagon's entire construction budget worldwide. The addition of two new operations towers provided the agency's headquarters complex with more space than eleven New York City World Trade Centers. 

But by 1997, the intelligence community budget had shrunk to what it had been in 1980, during the last years of the Carter administration and just before the Reagan administration gave the spooks the key to Fort Knox. At the same time, many of NSA's precious eavesdropping satellites were dying of old age and not being replaced. In the few years between 1991 and 1994, the number of spy satellites dropped by nearly half. "NSA's relative piece of the intelligence resource pie will likely diminish," Admiral William O. Studeman had told his workforce in a frank farewell memorandum on April 8, 1992. "Things will be tight, and the demand will be to continue to do more with less." 

Studeman's concerns were well founded. Between 1990 and 1997 the agency was forced to cut its staff by 17½ percent and was scheduled to increase the total to 24 percent by 2001. A commission headed by former defense secretary Harold Brown said that at least 10 percent more staff should be cut throughout the intelligence community. On top of that, a Pentagon inspector general's review in 1991—the first one ever done at NSA—found that the agency was too top-heavy and that management was asleep at the wheel in the oversight of a number of key areas. "We found that the growth of the Agency had not been centrally managed or planned," the inspection report concluded, "and that the NSA did not have sufficient internal oversight mechanisms to ensure the Agency efficiently accomplished its mission." The result was a serious bureaucratic shake-up. On October 1, 1992, Mike McConnell, Studeman's successor, instituted a major restructuring, slashing by 40 percent the number of deputy directors and by 29 percent the number of middle managers. Lower management was reduced by an average of 50 percent. At the same time, the number of people reporting directly to the director was cut from ninety to fifteen.4 

4. The Pentagon report also criticized the NSA for wasting millions of dollars on warehousing old magnetic tapes, failing to manage properly its highly secret special-access programs, and not adequately measuring whether the intelligence being collected matched the intelligence that was being asked for. Four years later, in 1996, the agency still had not corrected several of the problems.

"NSA personnel will be deeply affected by these changes," declared the NSA Newsletter. McConnell told a group of his senior staff, "As resources diminish we must reduce the Agency's overhead and build a structure that will make us more efficient." But, the cutbacks in personnel seemed to have a contradictory effect on the agency's budget. The cost of the shrunken workforce grew because of inflation, promotions, and the higher cost of benefits. These factors drove NSA's civilian payroll from about 30 percent of its budget in 1990 to nearly 40 percent in 1996. A White House study called the problem "acute" and said these "growing amounts allocated to meet the payroll have crowded out investments in new technologies and limited operational flexibility." It seemed that the more people NSA cut the less money it had for satellites and computers. 

When McConnell replaced Studeman in May 1992, the downsizing problem was on his desk waiting for him. "Employees should take this opportunity to return to their areas of expertise," said the Newsletter, paraphrasing the new director. "Cross-training, technical tracks, and mission involvement are the buzzwords of the future." The long handle of the budget ax extended even to some of the agency's most remote listening posts. In a further effort to reduce costs, NSA civilians began gradually being replaced by military personnel at some of the listening posts not shut down entirely. As the cuts continued into the new century, employees were encouraged to attend a workshop called "Coping with Change," and a noted speaker was brought in to give a lecture in the Friedman Auditorium on "Thriving in Turbulent Times." 

Most believed there were few more secure places to work than NSA, and that downsizing would never happen. "While our neighbors and family members in the private sector faced job uncertainty, we remained secure," moaned one worried worker in 1992. "We are now in the unenviable position of being uncertain about our futures. It is not an easy time to work here." Exit interviews with resigning employees reflected the same concerns. Many of them felt that a bond had been broken. 

But others believed that NSA had long been overstaffed. Dr. Howard Campaigne, a driving force in the computerization of code-breaking in the 1950s and 1960s, believed that the machines should have reduced staff costs. "I had visions . . . these would be labor-saving devices," recalled the former research chief, "and we wouldn't need a lot of people around. And it's been a continual disappointment that we had so many people around. Of course, what we've done is use these devices to do more [work] rather than to do what we were doing before more economically. But I still feel we ought to be able to do it with fewer people. More machines and fewer people." For those displaced, the former assistant director had one suggestion: "Join the 'buggy whip' manufacturers. Retire." 

To help ease the trauma of drastic personnel reductions, over 4,000 employees were given buyouts in 1999. At the same time, NSA offered a parachute dubbed Soft Landing to many of the employees headed for the door. The idea was to transfer the employees to jobs within the crypto-industrial complex—jobs with defense firms that had significant contracts with NSA. During the first year, the employee would be paid under an NSA contract, and after that he or she might be hired full-time by the contractor. 

Many such contracts called for the employee to remain right at NSA, although in a different job and in a different office. For example, Barbara Prettyman retired from her job as chief of staff for NSA's Health, Environmental, and Safety Services. Hired by Allied Signal under the Soft Landing program, she simply moved over to the agency's Information Systems Security offices, where she was assigned to create a national colloquium for information security education. 

Other companies taking part in the program included TRW, SAIC, and Lockheed Martin. The money to finance the Soft Landing contracts comes from funds the agency saves by retiring senior employees early. By 1998, after two years in operation, the program had found homes for more than 300 retirees at eight contractors, saving NSA $25 million along the way. 

Born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Greenville, South Carolina, during the middle of World War II, Mike McConnell graduated from the local college, Furman University, with a degree in economics in 1966. Shortly afterward he joined the Navy and was shipped off to Vietnam as a damage control officer on the USS Colleton, a ship attached to the Mobile Riverine Force in the Mekong Delta. Having survived the conflict, he went on to counterintelligence work with the Naval Investigative Service in Yokosuka, Japan, took a liking to the spy world, attended the Defense Intelligence College, and became an intelligence specialist. 

Assigned as the operations officer for the Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility in Rota, Spain, in 1976, McConnell received his initiation into the world of signals intelligence. "Four Navy chiefs and one NSA civilian took me under their wing to teach me Sigint," he recalled. "I learned as a young Navy lieutenant that Sigint is hard; it is complex, esoteric, and difficult to understand over its depth and breadth. ... It changed my understanding, respect for, and use of Sigint for the rest of my professional life." 

Following other assignments, including a tour as force intelligence officer aboard the USS La Salle in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, McConnell moved to NSA, where he headed up the Naval Forces Division.Then he went to Pearl Harbor as the top naval intelligence officer for the Pacific Fleet, a job that won him his first star. He earned a second while dealing with such issues as the fall of the Soviet Union and the war in the Persian Gulf as a key intelligence staffer to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

At NSA, McConnell soon found that it was far easier to eavesdrop than to convert intercepts into finished, usable intelligence. As always, code breaking—"processing"—was the hardest part. "I have three major problems," McConnell was often heard declaring, "processing, processing, and processing." Translation was also a major problem. "There now exists a world full of 'Navajo Code Talkers,' in a certain sense," noted McConnell. He was referring to the Native Americans who during World War II were employed to securely communicate sensitive messages because their language was unwritten, almost unknown outside their community, and thus almost impossible for an enemy to translate. "With the rich diversity of potential intelligence targets owing to possible U.S. involvement in low intensity conflict and regional crisis situations anywhere U.S. interests may be threatened," McConnell continued, "we are confronted by a linguistic challenge of staggering proportion." 

Down on the working level, the reductions and changes forced many managers to dig out their old earphones and go back to being operators. Similarly, those with language skills now in excess, such as Russian linguists, had to retrain in another language or develop new skills entirely. 

While the end of the Cold War brought a greater sense of tranquility to most parts of the country, it created a seismic shift at NSA. Gone were the old traditional targets, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Taking their place were new trouble spots that seemed to spring up almost anywhere. In 1980, fully 58 percent of the intelligence community's budget was targeted against the Soviet Union. Three years later NSA, desperate for Russian linguists, asked fifteen colleges, including Penn State and Georgetown University, to participate with the agency in a secrecy-shrouded Russian language internship program. 

But by 1993 only 13 percent of the intelligence budget was aimed at Russia, and Russian linguists were scrambling to find new vocabularies to master. Suddenly the buzz phrase was "exotic languages." 

Exotic languages have long been NSA's Achilles' heel. In 1985, for example, Libyan diplomatic messages were intercepted discussing the planning of the terrorist attack at La Belle discotheque in West Berlin. However, according to intelligence experts, a shortage of Berber translators led to a critical delay of several days in reading the dispatches. By then, the deadly bombing had already taken place.

In 1986, Bobby Inman had warned a congressional committee that "steadily deteriorating language training capabilities" presented "a major hazard to our national security." The message was underscored by the Pentagon's director of intelligence personnel and training, Craig L. Wilson, who spoke of the "dismal ignorance," in the Defense Department and the intelligence community, of Third World languages. 

A year after McConnell arrived, as President Clinton was considering military action in the former Yugoslavia, NSA began to get worried about finding enough people who could translate Serbo-Croatian. Thus, on April 23, 1993, a curious advertisement appeared in Commerce Business Daily. Placed by NSA's military organization, the Army Intelligence and Security Command, it sought "a group of approximately 125 linguists to provide translation and interpretation support for U.S. forces in Yugoslavia." The work, said the ad, "would be in a hostile, harsh environment." And the government would pick up the cost of "life, dismemberment and medical insurance." 

A similar crisis at NSA broke the following year, when President Clinton ordered American troops into Haiti to restore order. "When Haiti blew up a few years ago," said Deputy Director for Services Terry Thompson, "we looked around; there were a total of three Haitian Kreyol linguists in the entire cryptologic system. One in NSA, one in the Navy, and one in the Army, and that was it. So we had to go outsource— hire a lot of Haitian Creole speakers, many of whom lived in downtown Washington doing menial labor, and put them in a building over in Columbia [Maryland] and send them the material to transcribe." 

One reason for the shortage of linguists is the tedium of the job. "You sit there with a pair of headphones, rocking back and forth with your foot on a pedal trying to figure out what people said," recalled one former NSA Russian linguist. "It is very repetitious, incredibly boring, and very demanding. It could drive you crazy." However, it could also be very educational, said another Russian linguist, who recalled all the Russian curses he learned while eavesdropping on the walkie-talkie conversations of Soviet troops on maneuvers in Siberia. 

To help with the language problems, Director McConnell quietly turned to academia. Several colleges were paid to develop textbooks and teaching materials in exotic languages as well as to train university and NSA language teachers. Among the schools chosen was the predominantly black Florida A&M University, which was given a $1.74 million grant to fund courses in the difficult African languages of Zulu and Xhosa, spoken largely in South Africa; Farsi, which is spoken in Iran; and Punjabi and Bengali, from the Indian subcontinent. 

A side benefit of the grant, agency officials hoped, would be to recruit to the agency black students who had successfully completed the courses; this would not only build up the NSA language base but also help increase minority staffing. Unfortunately, however, many of the students enrolled in the courses had far more interest in international business than in eavesdropping on communications networks, and thus never went to work for NSA. 

One solution, which NSA for decades has been trying to perfect, is machine translation. In the early and mid-1980s, NSA was focusing on a variety of crises—the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the fundamentalist Islamic takeover in Iran, and the civil war in El Salvador. "NSA is faced with the growing problem of documents in virtually every language and script," said one agency report. To help find a way to quickly translate the reams of paper flowing into the agency written in unusual languages with strange alphabets, NSA turned to the University of Pennsylvania. 

The experimental program, funded on behalf of NSA by the Pentagon, involved designing optical scanning technology to first identify and then read a number of exotic languages. The machine was eventually able to translate Azerbaijani-language newspapers printed in a non-standard version of the Cyrillic alphabet. A Turkic dialect, Azerbaijani is spoken by several million people in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan and the contiguous areas of Iran and Afghanistan. Other languages focused on by the project included Somali, Slovenian, and a Mayan Indian language, Chorti, that is spoken in parts of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. 

Today, for more commonplace languages, NSA uses programs such as SYSTRAN that automatically translate text at up to 750 pages per hour using Russian dictionaries containing more than half a million words. The program translates technical texts with better than 90 percent accuracy. On average, human translation takes forty-five minutes per page. NSA has also developed a technique that allows analysts with no prior knowledge of a language to quickly search machine-readable foreign language databases for keywords and topics. 

To find key text quickly within a very large collection of foreign language documents—such as Chinese or Devanagari (Sanskrit)—one program NSA uses is Oleada XConcord. 

A further breakthrough in NSA's ability to pick out the right tree in a vast forest of words came with the development of the software called Semantic Forests. Semantic Forests allows NSA to sift through printed transcripts of conversations, faxes, computer transfers, or any other written intercepts and intelligently come up with the targeted subjects in which the agency is most interested. The name derives from the software's ability to create a weighted "tree" of meanings for each word in a document. During lab tests, the software quickly sifted through an electronic filter large volumes of printed matter, including transcripts of speech and data from Internet discussion groups. One of the sample questions in the test was "What have the effects of the UN sanctions against Iraq been on the Iraqi people, the Iraqi economy, or world oil prices?" Initial tests proved very successful, increasing the ability to locate target information from 19 percent to 27 percent in just one year. 

Far more difficult than machine translation of printed texts is automatic translation and transcription of voice communications, such as intercepted telephone conversations in a variety of languages and accents. The ability to automatically spot targeted words in millions of telephone calls all over the world has long been a goal of NSA. A recent breakthrough was made by biomedical engineers at the University of Southern California, who claim to have created the first machine system that can recognize spoken words better than humans can. The research was largely funded by the Pentagon, long used as a cover for NSA contracts. 

According to the university, the system can "instantly produce clean transcripts of conversations, identifying each of the speakers." Known at NSA as "Speaker ID," the USC's Berger-Liaw Neural Network Speaker Independent Speech Recognition System can mimic the way brains process information. This gives the computer the ability to conduct "word spotting" in target communications regardless of who or what pronounces the word. 

The new system is also far better than the human ear at picking out words from vast amounts of white noise. It can even extract targeted words or conversations from the background clutter of other voices, such as the hubbub heard during conference calls, meetings, or cocktail parties. "The system can identify different speakers of the same word with superhuman acuity," said university officials. 

Despite such progress, by 2001 there was still far more traffic than there were people or machines to handle it. "It's a good-size problem," said Hayden. "It's one that we're paying attention to, but the fixes are not immediate. There's probably no philosophers' stone here that we can touch and say, 'Oh yes, now the linguist problem's fixed.' There's probably a whole bunch of discrete decisions that you make that you begin to reduce the magnitude of the problem. One aspect of the problem is, just given the nature of our business, the demands on linguists are higher." 

Some NSA language training takes enormous amounts of time, said Hayden, who himself was trained as a Bulgarian linguist. "Group Three languages, and I believe that's Arabic and Hebrew, take eighteen months," he said. "And Group Four languages take two years. And those are Chinese, Japanese . . . And then there is a whole other addition there to turn someone who has working knowledge of the popular language into a crypto-linguist, which is the specialized vocabulary. . . . It's a long time, these are long-term investments. And you can see why, then, we have trouble mostly with our military linguists who move a lot, whereas a civilian you hire for thirty-five years and you make a front-end investment of five years, you've still got thirty years of return. You've got a GI going through here on an eighteen-month tour." 

Realizing NSA's personnel plight, the House Intelligence Committee began a major push in the late 1990s to redirect money away from various fields, ranging from satellites to support staff, and toward analysis and linguists. 

"We need to hire a lot more people than we have authorized strength to do," Terry Thompson told a group of employees in late 1999. "The DO has recently told the Human Resources Review Group that they would like to hire twenty-six hundred more people to do language work and IA work, Intelligence Analyst work. And the reason for that is, if they look at their attrition projections, they expect to lose about a thousand people over the next couple of years and so they want to hire those people back. And then they want a plus-up of about sixteen hundred people over and above that, just to be able to do the work that comes in today." According to one senior NSA official, the agency hired about 698 people in 2000. For 2001, Congress gave NSA an additional $3 million to go toward hiring, plus $3.5 million more to use for signing bonuses for particularly desirable candidates. 

Just as the fall of the Soviet Union created a need for exotic languages, the proliferation of low-cost, complex encryption systems and fast computers has forced NSA to search for more mathematicians whom they can convert to codebreakers. In a series of lectures at NSA in the late 1950s, William F. Friedman, the father of modern cryptology, argued that cryptology should be considered a separate and distinct branch of mathematics. It is little wonder, therefore, that NSA employs more math majors than any other place in the country, and possibly the world. 

Thus the national decline in math test scores, the decreasing focus on math in the classroom, and the paltry number of graduate students seeking doctorates in the subject have become major concerns within NSA. "The philosophy here is that unless the U.S. mathematics community is strong, healthy, vibrant," said James R. Schatz, chief of NSA's mathematics research division, "then we're not going to have the kind of population to recruit from that we need." 

Some at NSA trace the growing scarcity of mathematicians back to the early 1980s. It was then, according to one agency official, that "the agency succumbed, as did the rest of the American society, to the increasing gap between its population of technical specialists and a generalist population." As the last editor of the NSA Technical Journal,which ceased publication in 1980, the official witnessed the decline in mathematical and scientific education firsthand. It was one of the reasons for the Journal's termination, he said, noting that many of the contributions were becoming increasingly "irrelevant to (and unintelligible to) all but a small audience." He added that if Friedman was correct in including cryptology as a branch of mathematics, "then large numbers of NSA's employees, even at the professional level (and within the professions, even within senior positions), are ill-equipped for their trade." 

In an effort to reverse the trend, NSA recently launched a new program to seed the academic soil in order to keep the supply of mathematicians coming. It involved providing $3 million a year, through research grants, to mathematicians and also to summer programs for undergraduates. Yearlong sabbaticals at the agency were even offered to promising number lovers. In a rare foray into the unclassified world, then-director Minihan expressed his worry to a convention of mathematicians in 1998. "The Cold War is characterized by battles not fought, lives not lost," he said. "That era was fought with mathematicians arid cryptologists." 

"Over a three-year period," said Schatz optimistically in 1998, "we're going to be hiring over a hundred mathematicians with Ph.D.'s. There's nothing like that in the world, really. A university might have one or two openings a year, if that." But just as NSA seems to be getting its need for mathematicians under control, it is facing an even more daunting task in recruiting enough computer scientists. Among the problems, according to Michael J. Jacobs, chief of NSA's codemakers, is 42 percent fewer graduates with computer science degrees now than in 1986. 

Among the most sensitive issues facing NSA in the post—Cold War period has been the hiring, as well as promotion, of minorities and women. For years NSA has had serious problems keeping up with the rest of government—and the rest of the intelligence community—in such employment statistics. "I have been here at NSA for over twenty years," wrote one frustrated employee in the mid-1990s, "and as a minority, have experienced racial discrimination like I have never seen before. The minorities here at NSA are so very stigmatized by the 'Do nothing, powerless' EEO [Equal Employment Office] and the IG [Inspector General] organizations . . . there is no adequate or effective process for minority complaints here at NSA. Many racial discrimination and fraud cases have been reported/presented to NSA's EEO and IG, and nothing, absolutely nothing, has been done." 

Another complained, "EEO is a joke. . . . Nothing is held confidentially or anonymously. Retaliation is common and well known around the Agency. Most African Americans have stopped complaining and warn younger, less experienced African Americans against complaining in fear of retaliation and retribution." And still another cautioned, "It is a well known fact that if you stand up for your rights it can be a crippling experience, but become a whistle blower, and your career will experience the Kiss of Death!" 

In a 1988 study of the intelligence community, done at the request of Congress, the National Academy of Public Administration found women and minorities underrepresented at NSA. Two years later, the Senior Advisory Group, a group of senior black NSA employees, examined the barriers faced by African American applicants and employees in hiring, promotion, and career development. They gave the agency low marks, citing institutional and attitudinal barriers. And in 1993 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concluded that little had been done to correct problems identified five years earlier. Finally, in 1994, both Congress and the Pentagon's inspector general hauled the director in for questioning as to progress in hiring and promoting minorities and women. 

A key problem, the Department of Defense inspector general pointed out, was the tendency of NSA recruiters to go after the "best and the brightest." "The philosophy," said one senior personnel manager, "is that it is better to hire an applicant with a 3.2 grade point average from Stanford than one with a 4.0 from a school you've never heard of." Although the former strategy keeps the agency well endowed intellectually, it does not help the agency correct its racial and gender imbalance, it was argued. 

NSA did make some efforts to recruit minorities, but more often than not they were only halfhearted. In an effort to recruit Hispanic students, the agency set up a Southwestern Recruiting Office in Phoenix in 1989. However, instead of staffing it with a Hispanic recruiter, the agency sent a sixty-year-old black male. The result was a total of eleven people hired in three years—none of whom were Hispanic. The office was closed in 1992. 

For Director McConnell, the problem lay in the numbers. Although in 1993 women made up 43.4 percent of the federal workforce, at NSA they represented only 36 percent. And while 27.7 percent of federal government employees were members of minority groups, NSA's minority representation stood at a dismal 11 percent. In his agency's defense, McConnell pointed to the highly technical nature of its work— mathematics, engineering, computer science, and language: "skill areas," he said, "in which minorities have been traditionally underrepresented." 

For example, McConnell noted, "we have probably the highest concentration of mathematicians in the country." But "of the 430 doctoral degrees in mathematics awarded to U.S. citizens in 1992, only 11, or 2.5 percent, went to minorities," he said. "Can you imagine the competition for that 2.5 percent between companies like IBM or GM or whatever and NSA? It's very, very stiff competition." 

To help correct the imbalance, McConnell established a policy of encouraging his recruiters to make one-third of their new hires minorities. In fact, the recruiters exceeded the quota, achieving 38.3 percent minority hires. But with NSA hiring fewer than 200 full-time staffers a year between 1992 and 1996, the quota system at this late date amounted to little more than tokenism. In the meantime, McConnell was left to deal with complaints from the agency's white males, who make up 57.5 percent of the workforce. Although no "reverse discrimination" lawsuits had yet been filed, McConnell was holding his breath. "So far I haven't gone to court," he said. "Time will tell." 

In an effort to ease tensions, an Office of Diversity Programs was established to help ensure that minorities were fairly represented in programs throughout the agency. Among the units of the office is the Alaska/Native American Employment Program, which in 1999 sponsored a presentation by storyteller Penny Gamble Williams, the tribal chief of the Chappaquiddick Indian Nation of the Wampanoag Indian Nation, relating tales passed down through the generations. A luncheon of buffalo meat in the Canine Suite followed. 

After more than four years in the director's chair, McConnell retired on February 22, 1996. His replacement was Kenneth A. Minihan, a tall, broad-shouldered Air Force lieutenant general. Unlike McConnell, who had spent most of his career in staff (as opposed to command) positions, General Minihan arrived at NSA after running two previous intelligence organizations: the Air Intelligence Agency and, briefly, the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was born in 1943, the same year as McConnell, in Pampa, a dusty, oil-soaked town straddling the old Santa Fe Railroad in the Texas Panhandle. After graduating from Florida State University in 1966, he entered the Air Force as an intelligence officer, serving in Vietnam, Panama, and Italy and in a variety of positions in the Pentagon and at Air Force Headquarters. 

In 1981 Minihan went to NSA as chief of the Office of Support to Military Operations and Plans. He also served in the agency's Directorate of Operations, as commander of the Air Force's 6917 Electronic Security Group. Minihan was named director of DIA in July 1995; there, one of his chief assignments was to review tainted information about Russian weapons systems passed by the CIA to the Pentagon. The Pentagon had received this bad intelligence because of the massive compromise of American spies in Russia by CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames. 

According to Minihan, NSA's problems had become a great concern to both Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and CIA director John Deutsch. "They would use the phrase 'NSA doesn't get it,' " he said. "And they were somewhat impressed with how I was beginning to take over the reins of DIA, in the sense that we 'got it' at DIA." Thus the decision was made to shift Minihan to NSA. During the transition to his new job, Minihan spoke to a great many people both inside and outside government about the agency and was stunned to find that the reaction was virtually universal. "I would say I spent a good month or so talking with lots of people," he said. "It was almost riveting in the common sense that they all expressed that we [NSA] don't get it." 

Once in place at Fort Meade, it didn't take long for Minihan to understand why this was so. "It . . . really surprised me, both how accurate Dr. Perry and Dr. Deutsch were . . . ," he said. "In my mind we had fallen into a—I've never used this phrase before—sort of like a loser's mentality, a loser's mind-set." One cause, said Minihan, was the constant downsizing: "We'd lost about a third of our workforce. What we had done is we were accepting the loss of program and people resources as a norm. You've got another three percent cut. So we're going through our tenth straight year of three percent decline. And we just accepted that." Another early concern for Minihan was finding a new deputy. When he arrived, the position was occupied by William P. Crowell, appointed by Admiral McConnell two years earlier. A native of Louisiana with an impish grin and a taste for Cajun shrimp, Crowell joined the agency in 1962 and rose quickly, a decade later becoming chief of A Group, the section responsible for attacking Soviet cipher systems. Crowell foresaw the enormous impact that the personal computer would have on both society and NSA and pushed the agency to begin taking advantage of commercial, off-the-shelf technology. This was the key, he believed, to improving both the way NSA attacked code problems and the way it disseminated the results. Eventually rising to deputy director for operations, Crowell championed the Intelink, the highly secret intelligence community version of the Internet. "He was a 'geek' in the most positive sense," said former NSA official Fredrick Thomas Martin. "He understood technology. He knew the intelligence business." 

But Minihan was concerned that the position of deputy director had become too powerful, so that the director was little more than a ceremonial chief. "The DDIR [deputy director] is part of the seducing," he said, "the seduction of the director, so that the director becomes the host for dinners and lunches, the speaker at major engagements and awards and things like that. . . . And so part of the DDIR's efforts are, in my view, to numb the director." Adding, "It is not healthy to numb the director," Minihan also charged that deputy directors became bureaucratic warlords. "They purge those beneath them who are not on their team, and then they elevate those who have been on their team," he said. "Some people go into exile, some people retire."

So Minihan and Crowell began locking horns almost immediately. "I was very disruptive to his definition of what the deputy director should be. I took a lot of things that he had on his plate and moved them to my own plate, because I wanted those to be the director's authorities." Minihan also opposed warlordism. "I was asked by Bill, 'Well, who's on your team?' " said Minihan. "I was not willing to participate in a 'Who's on my team.' . . . The answer is, 'They all are.' " Minihan added, "It didn't matter to me a bit who Bill was. It was what I wanted to do." 

Nor did Minihan get along with the various senior officials in the agency—the deputy directors for operations, information security, and so on. "My first two or three weeks, maybe a month or so, as I went around, it was pretty clear that I was not going to hit it off that well with the DDs [deputy directors] who were in place. . . . And we were having natural tense sessions." On top of that, according to Minihan, the senior officials didn't even get along with one another. "The DDs not only were resistant to me," said Minihan, "which I could handle, but they were resistant to each other. That's not healthy! And so, part of the grinding was, 'You guys don't even like each other? How is my institution going to be run if it's clear that you all don't even get along?' " 

To employees, the result sounded like squabbling parents throwing dishes at each other. "You could hear the groans even down at our level," said Dr. David Hatch, the agency historian. Minihan added, "The workers were telling me the same thing: 'Those guys don't get it. They're always in a fight.' " 

Given the tension, there was little surprise when Crowell left in September 1997. 

Nearly twenty years earlier, Bobby Inman had arrived at NSA with views similar to Minihan's concerning the need for a strong director and a weak deputy. Inman chose a woman for the position: Ann Caracristi. ("Ann knew that I wanted to be the director," he said.) Minihan did the same, choosing Barbara A. McNamara as only the second woman deputy director. "Part of the transition from Bill to Barbara McNamara was to make certain that she understood what, how I thought the two portfolios should be handled," said Minihan. "I had a full expectation that there wasn't going to be any 'numbing' in what we were doing. And that was part of the interview: to be certain that that was ... a clear message in that sense." 

Short, with close-cropped blond hair, Barbara A. McNamara— "BAM," as she was known to many within NSA—was born in Clinton, Massachusetts, and joined the agency as a linguist after receiving a degree in French from Regis College in 1963. At the time of her appointment to the deputyship, McNamara headed up the Operations Directorate and had also served as the NSA's ambassador to the Pentagon: the National Cryptologic Representative, Defense. 

"I am honored to have been sworn in before you today," McNamara told the audience in NSA's cafeteria after the ceremony. "I would like to think that years from now, this organization will stand together again on a 'Day of Celebration' and speak about our successes yet unknown." 

The new pair inherited not only the outgoing team's adjoining eighth floor offices but also its quagmire of race and gender issues. McConnell's policies seemed to please few, if any. The number of NSA employees filing complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission more than doubled, going from seventeen in 1990 to forty-five in 1995. Some even began to question whether national security was being imperiled by the promotion of inexperienced employees to sensitive jobs in order to meet hiring quotas. By 1997, following Minihan's arrival, at least a dozen lawsuits had been filed related to race or sex discrimination, and former employees had begun branding senior leadership the "Irish Mafia" while seeing the Office of Discrimination Complaints and Counseling "a party organization for blacks." 

Under a new promotion policy, women and minority candidates received at least one round of extra consideration for promotion, thus allowing a minority woman three chances to advance where a white male got one. Such policies provoked anger and frustration from many longtime employees. William J. Sonntag was considered for promotion to deputy division chief in 1993 but failed to get the job; all three slots went to women. He sued, claiming, "I was denied consideration of a management position on the sole basis that white males were not being considered for three such jobs in my office." Sonntag lost his case but the government later settled with him when he appealed. 

Sonntag and other employees essentially alleged that NSA used an aggressive brand of affirmative action to deny staffers promotions or, in some cases, even dismiss them. Emile J. Renault, Jr., an attorney who worked at the agency for twenty-seven years, agreed. In the spring of 1997 he received more than twenty requests from NSA employees thinking about bringing suit: "Suddenly it's become overwhelming." Calling the personnel office a "paramilitary group," Renault said that the agency uses information from confidential employee-counseling sessions to revoke security clearances. And losing a clearance at NSA means losing a job. "When you say 'national security,' everybody just wilts," Renault said. "Everybody hides under it." 

To resolve internal problems, NSA has an Office of Inspector General, with a number of attorneys and investigators, but some employees feel that the main function of this office is simply to protect the agency and not to redress injustices. Few have greater reason to believe that than Mary Ann Sheehy, who transferred from the FBI to NSA in 1988 and was assigned to an extremely sensitive and covert Pentagon unit in northern Virginia. 

In 1994, while stopped at a red light, a car plowed into the rear of her Toyota Tercel, leaving her with a permanent 15 percent disability. As a result, she filed suit against the driver of the other car. In order to establish lost wages as a result of her injuries, she asked the agency to release copies of her employment records to the driver's attorney. As defined by NSA, "employment information" consists simply of verification of an employee's position, grade, salary, and length of service. She also directed that the agency have no communication with the driver's attorney. 

Later, to her horror, Sheehy learned that NSA's Office of Personnel not only telephoned the defense attorney but then sent her virtually every paper in her file, including copies of her pre-polygraph psychological records, pre-employment psychological and psychiatric evaluations, personality profiles, and all her agency medical records. It was a clear violation of both the federal Privacy Act as well as NSA's own internal guidelines. Also shocked by the release was NSA psychologist Dr. Michael J. Wigglesworth, who attempted to get the material back from the attorney. "I am quite concerned about this," he wrote to the lawyer. "It is the policy of this office [Psychological Services Division] to release this kind of information only to the employee, their therapist, or their representative. ... As the material is still protected information under the Privacy Act, I would appreciate your returning all of the psychological information to me." But the attorney never returned the materials. 

On November 7, 1994, Sheehy protested the actions of the personnel office to NSA's Office of Inspector General, requesting a formal internal investigation. Three weeks later the opposing attorney used the very private documents, including the polygraph-related documents, in open court. "The files released by NSA were utilized by the defense attorney to embarrass, humiliate, and intimidate me during judicial proceedings," Sheehy said, "as well as jeopardize my future opportunities for employment as a covert intelligence officer." 

Undeterred, Sheehy continued to fight within the secret bureaucracy. "I requested an appointment with the IG, Frank Newton, but was denied," she said. "My telephone calls to him were never returned. I followed the chain of command all the way to Ralph Adams, the executive director of NSA. In October 1995 he told me to sue the agency. I wanted to speak to the director then Lieutenant General Mike McConnell, but was told that was impossible." Six months later, in April 1996, the Inspector General's Office finally issued its report. Despite the gross violation of her privacy, the IG simply sided with the agency, concluding that "no evidence of improper or illegal activity on the part of Agency officials was found with respect to the release of your records under the Privacy Act." 

After years of frustration and lack of promotion, Sheehy sent a scathing letter to Attorney General Janet Reno in 1999. "NSA believes it is above the law, can police itself and is accountable to no one," she wrote. "Instead of helping me, they lied to cover their illegal conduct." Once again she was brushed off with a stock response: "While we sympathize with your circumstances, there is not sufficient evidence of a criminal violation of the Privacy Act for us to take any further action." 

Finally, in the spring of 2000, Sheehy asked the U.S. Attorney in Baltimore to look into NSA's treatment of her. The U.S. Attorney's Office responded on April 13, saying it had received her letter. That very day, in what Sheehy considers retaliation, NSA dispatched two officials from the Office of Security to Virginia to strip her of her special agent badge and identification card. Only after two months and the intervention of a high ranking Pentagon intelligence official did NSA relent and return Sheehy's credentials to her. The U.S. Attorney's Office eventually dismissed her complaint, finding that no federal laws were broken. "You should look for another job," an attorney once warned her, "because they are going to retaliate—they're going to put you in a closet and give you a terrible supervisor and force you out." 

By 2000, according to several employees, the IG's office had become more responsive, under the direction of Ethan L. Bauman, an outsider who had previously served as a federal prosecutor. 

General Minihan could easily have served as the model for William H. Whyte, Jr.'s, Organization Man. Almost weekly he announced a new program or theme. He came up with "Future Day" and The Future gram to bring "all parts of the Agency together with ideas, concerns, and solutions." ("I think it's magnificent," he later said. "And I thought of it myself!") He created an internal Internet web page outlining his goals and priorities for the next 30, 100, 365, and 1,000 days. 

He would throw out slogans, such as "One Team, One Mission," and ask employees to take pledges ("No one will work harder . . . ," "No one will stand watch longer . . . ," etc.). 

Minihan also pushed the NSA's normally cenobite senior managers to broaden their experience by seeking an assignment or two with other intelligence agencies. And he would hand out small medallions, "The Director's Coin," when he saw an on-the-spot need to recognize someone's special contribution to the agency. He even started an annual week-long festival to bring together agency staff from diverse cultural backgrounds. 

To help break out of the bureaucratic mind-set, Minihan announced, "Out-of-the-box thinking is not only authorized, it is encouraged." He then set up his own personal "secret team," a sort of anti-bureaucracy commando force designed to carry out his orders in the most expeditious manner possible, regardless of the organizational chart. 

Named the Skunk Works, after the famous Lockheed team that built the spectacular U-2 and SR-71 spy planes ahead of schedule, under budget, and in total secrecy, the five-member team worked directly for Minihan. He would turn to them when he needed quick action on a project in order to cut through the agency's red tape. The motto of the Skunk Works was "anytime, anywhere, on time, and right the first time." 

It was as though Minihan had taken over a losing football team and was determined to snap it back into shape. "Now is the time for Team NSA to step forward and lead America's entry into the 21st century," he said in his first announcement to the workforce. "We are no longer a world-class organization; NSA is the class of the world." 

But some saw Minihan's efforts as a crass attempt to bludgeon workers with tacky slogans and heavy-handed propaganda. "Where are my hip boots?" wrote one employee upset and embarrassed over Minihan's gushing enthusiasm over his "Future Day." 

The propaganda about Future Day just will not end! . .. The truth is that participation in Future Day was mandatory and, worse yet, the word came down through management that all responses to Future Day should be positive, or else. In my many years at the Agency, I have never seen such widespread and blatantly coercive pressure used on employees as was the case with Future Day. All negative or dissenting opinion was quashed, except that of a few people willing to risk their careers by expressing their opinions on ENLIGHTEN [the NSA internal e-mail system]. 

The fact that NSA's management is resorting to this level of coercion and propaganda is not merely embarrassing or irritating—it is a sure sign that the Agency has lost its corporate integrity and suffers from a deplorable lack of qualified leadership. A first step toward reversing this downward trend would be an official, public acknowledgment by NSA seniors that employees were pressured to provide only positive feedback regarding Future Day and that the proclaimed benefits of Future Day have been grossly overhyped. 

To unify his "team," Minihan attempted to break down the thick walls separating the Sigint and Infosec (information security) sides of NSA as well as the cultural barriers that divided the military and civilian workers. Where the National Sigint Operations Center had been the exclusive club of the eavesdroppers and codebreakers, Minihan brought in the Infosec folks and renamed it the National Security Operations Center. He also launched the NSA's first worldwide virtual town meeting. "We now have people talking about both sides of the mission in ways that we haven't seen for a long, long time," said one senior official, "and that's pretty exciting." 

While many in NSA welcomed Minihan's aggressive, all-for-one-and one-for-all management style and his budgetary innovations, the politicians on Capitol Hill who held the key to the agency's strongbox were fuming. In 1998 the House Intelligence Committee even threatened to withhold funds unless the agency made "very large changes" in its "culture and methods of operation." Of particular concern was Minihan's lack of adequate "strategic and business planning" as well as the agency's resistance to ordered budget cuts, and the diversion "from their intended purpose" of funds previously allocated to the agency. 

Minihan's accounting system was also a shambles. According to a classified Pentagon inspector general's report released in 1998, auditors found that NSA had not instituted required internal controls and ignored laws and regulations, such as the Chief Financial Officers Act, necessary to produce accurate financial statements. "The NSA FY 1997 financial statements were materially incomplete and inaccurate," said the report. "The financial statements omitted real property located at a field site, a portion of Accounts Payable and a portion of operating expenses." This was not the first time the Inspector General's Office had found NSA's books out of order: in August 1996 it found similar inaccuracies. 

The mismanagement left Minihan and NSA open to harsh criticism by House committee members. The agency officials "cannot track allocations for critical functions," the panel said in its report on the fiscal 1999 Intelligence Authorization Act. As a result, "Fences have been placed on portions of the [NSA] budget with the prospect that a considerable amount of money could be programmed for other intelligence community needs if NSA does not develop strategic and business planning." 

Even more humiliatingly, about the same time that the House report was released, the Pentagon cut Minihan's direct lines to the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In a plan approved in late April 1998, Minihan and other senior NSA officials had to first report through an assistant defense secretary several rungs down the ladder, one responsible for command, control, communications, and intelligence, or "C3I" in intelligence jargon. 

Adding to Minihan's woes was the discovery that NSA for years had been seriously mismanaging its mega-million-dollar high-tech computer and information technology systems. One organization in NSA would buy a top-of-the-line system only to discover that it was incompatible with other systems in the agency; millions of dollars' worth of new equipment would be bought that duplicated—or was inferior to—equipment already owned by the agency. 

To correct the situation, the Secretary of Defense ordered NSA to install a sort of budget czar overseeing all purchasing and use of information technology. In 1997 Minihan named Ronald Kemper to the new post of chief information officer for NSA. Kemper also headed up the agency's new Enterprise Information Technology Office. 

From the moment he walked into his spacious office on the top floor of OPS 2B as the fourteenth DIRNSA, Minihan had his eye on the new millennium. He saw a future where wars were fought not on muddy battlefields but in the invisible ether, in cyper space, and there the NSA was king. "Just as control of industrial technology was key to military and economic power during the past two centuries," he told the citizens of the secret city, "control of information technology will be vital in the decades ahead. ... In the future, threats will arise and battles will be fought and won in the information domain. This is, and has always been, the natural operating environment of the National Security Agency. . . . Information will give us the power to pick all the locks." 

Searching for a catchy phrase, Minihan came up with "Information dominance for America." Said Minihan, "And then a couple of times the Brits and others beat up on me; I figure I got to add 'and its allies.' " 

Minihan's metaphor for the future was not a technology superhighway but a technology sword, a sword that could cut both ways. "Though new technologies provide tremendous opportunities to share information and develop new relationships," he warned, "those same technologies are the primary weapons of the electronic road warriors of the future. 'Techno-terrorists,' ranging from mischievous teens to sophisticated nation and state adversaries, have agendas and potential destructive powers far more wide-ranging than we are accustomed to. Their targets will be our information databases, emergency services, power grids, communications systems, and transportation systems. . . . We must continue this fight." 

The centerpiece of Minihan's Year 2000 battle plan for NSA was his "National Cryptologic Strategy for the 21st Century," in which NSA would take the lead in the conflicts of the future—both protecting the nation from cyber attacks and taking the offense with information warfare. Minihan put this work on the same level as protecting from nuclear attacks. "Information warfare poses a strategic risk of military failure and catastrophic economic loss and is one of the toughest threats this nation faces at the end of this century," he said. "We must be able to determine if we are being attacked, who is conducting the attack, and what to do if we are attacked. . . . We will also continue targeting intelligence for information warfare at levels of detail and timeliness comparable to those achieved for conventional and nuclear warfare." 

But by the end of his tour, Minihan still had not corrected some of NSA's most grievous problems, and the House Intelligence Committee showed him no mercy. It bluntly declared, "The committee believes that NSA is in serious trouble." Although it continued to pour large sums into the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network, its satellites and codebreaking capabilities, the committee said, "money and priority alone will not revive NSA, nor the overall signals intelligence system." The problem, said the panel, is not lack of money but lack of management. "The committee believes that NSA management has not yet stepped up to the line." 

In a farewell note to his employees, Minihan talked of both the successes and setbacks of his tour. "Looking back," he wrote, "we have accomplished much together. As is our tradition, those successes remain known only to a few. We have also experienced the continuation of the largest draw-down in our history. At the same time, we have been confronted with a tidal wave of new technologies and transnational threats which some believed threatened our very existence." Privately, in his office, Minihan was more candid. "It's the hardest job I've ever had," he said. "It sucks the life out of you. You know, if you're awake, you're thinking about this job." 

In his last days, Minihan feared that his successor would shift from the course he had set for the agency. "I think it will be catastrophic if we allowed the person to drift away from the scheme that we've set up," he said to several employees in his office. Then he said it was up to them to keep the new director on course. "And I think that's actually more a question of you and I and the folks here than it is a question for this guy. So I've done my part with this guy. But his background is actually completely different if you look back at us. I've been in the business a lot. He has not. I was sent here with a 'Do they get it or not?' Now his question is, 'Are you going to stay the course or not.' " 

One week later, on March 15, 1999, Minihan walked between a double row of well-wishers, past the shiny turnstiles of OPS 2A, and out into the chilly air of retirement. No more government-paid cook, car, and chauffeur. No more government housing. No more secrets with his morning coffee. Gone was his subscription to the Top Secret/Umbra National SIGINT File, gone was his high-speed connection to the supersecret Intelink. Now his daily intelligence summary would be found rolled in a plastic wrapper on the driveway of his new Annapolis, Maryland, home. In place of a briefing on the latest advances against a Chinese cipher system, he now had the daily crossword puzzle to tease his brain.

The moving vans, loaded with Minihan's well-traveled belongings, had barely pulled away from the handsome redbrick house on Butler Avenue when painters and cleaners arrived to spruce it up for his successor. For more than four decades this has been the official residence of the director of NSA. Located in a restricted, tree-shaded corner of Fort Meade, it is equipped with its own Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). Inside the Vault Type Room is a STU-III crypto phone connected to NSA, about three miles away, and a heavy safe in which to hold highly classified documents brought home for late-night reading. 

On a wall near the kitchen is a plaque containing the names of all the NSA heads who have lived there—every director except for the first, Lieutenant General Ralph Canine. After Minihan's departure, a new brass plate was attached to the plaque, one bearing the name of Michael V. Hayden, an Air Force lieutenant general and the fifteenth director of NSA. 

In addition to a house, Hayden had inherited an ax. He would have to use it to slice away at NSA's personnel levels more than other directors had done. In order to reduce the personnel rolls, NSA for the first time began turning over to outside contractors highly sensitive work previously reserved to NSA employees. This project, called Groundbreaker, was unveiled in 2000 to the dismay of many in the agency. Projections were that it would "impact more than 3,000 employees." As many as 1,500 employees and 800 contractors would lose their jobs under the project. However, those affected would be guaranteed jobs with whichever contractor won the bidding for the contract. Those who declined to work for the new contractor would be let go. 

Hayden called the project "unprecedented" because it involved turning over to private industry the management and development of nearly all of the agency's nonclassified information technology programs. The contracts were worth $5 billion over ten years. The drastic measures were taken largely because of years of poor in-house management. "Our information technology infrastructure is a critical part of our mission and it needs some repair," said Stephen E. Tate, chief of NSA's Strategic Directions Team. "It is a burning platform and we've got to fix it." 

But some longtime employees think the agency is sacrificing senior analysts to buy more expensive satellites to collect more information to be analyzed by fewer experienced people. "They're buying all those new toys," said one twenty-six-year veteran, "but they don't have the people to use them. It's always happened that way, but more so in the past seven or eight years. The people who provide the intelligence aren't there anymore. So things are starting to slip through the cracks." 

Among those cracks was NSA's failure to warn of India's nuclear test in 1998, a mistake that John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists called "the intelligence failure of the decade." Pike added, "The question of 'toys versus boys' in the NSA budget has been, and will remain, controversial. It's my understanding that Minihan's view of this is, they've got too many people and they need more toys. They're clearly trying to have their cake and eat it, too." 

In order to cut as few linguists and analysts as possible, some of the heaviest reductions were made in support functions at NSA—turning the agency into a colder and less personal environment. "There is a significant amount of concern from Congress and from our overseers," Terry Thompson told a group of technical employees, "about how much money and resources we're devoting to human resources activity at NSA." He joked: "We have thousands of people doing resources management at NSA; half of them spend time generating work for the other half. If we had a good business process and a good way of handling our budget . . . we could free up a lot of those to do other things." 

Thus, just as NSA's vast unclassified information technology operations were turned over to outside contractors, so were many of the agency's human resources activities. The contract went to Peoplesoft, a California corporation that specializes in automating human resources functions. "The transition from working with a human being down the hall to working with a computer on your desktop to do most of your human resources business is a tough transition for everybody," said Thompson. 

For employees stressed out by all the changes, the agency has its own mental health clinic. Hidden away in the Parkway Corporate Center in Hanover, Maryland, to provide "anonymity and confidentiality," the center has a staff of thirteen fully cleared clinical psychologists and social workers. In addition to courses in stress management and coping with organizational change, the NSA's Employee Assistance Service provides a wide range of programs, on topics such as assertiveness training, bereavement, dealing with difficult people, weight control, eating disorders, and even social skills enhancement. A "significant number" of EAS clients, says one report, are treated for depression. The EAS also has branch offices at NSA's major listening posts in England and Germany. 

Seventy-two percent of NSA employees who visit EAS are "self referred"; others are sent by their supervisors. A person's boss may call the psychology office to verify that the employee kept an appointment, but cannot probe into the problems discussed. To ensure confidentiality, all EAS files are kept separate from normal NSA personnel and security files. Nevertheless, the Office of Security is made aware when a person visits the office. And if it is determined that "national security is threatened," the confidentiality of the sessions can be broken.

Ironically, while one group of senior managers at NSA is searching for ways to reduce the employment rolls, another group, in the Information Security Directorate, is attempting to stem the brain drain caused by bigbucks offers from private industry. As computers take over more and more segments of society, so does the demand grow for highly experienced computer and information security specialists to protect that data. At the top of the list of places to which corporate headhunters are now turning is NSA. "It's a real worry," said one senior NSA executive. "If the issue is salary, we're in a noncompetitive position." 

"Our hiring program skims off the cream from the available hiring pool year after year," said Terry Thompson. "And so we have a very, very high-quality workforce. All of that says that when you go out, shopping yourself around for a job, if you have NSA on your resume, it's worth more than the ten thousand dollars or whatever the amount [the increase in salary] is for having a TS/SI [Top Secret/Special Intelligence] clearance. There's a brand-name recognition that goes above that for people who work at NSA." 

According to a study by the U.S. Department of Commerce, "While average starting salaries [in the private sector] for graduates with bachelor's degrees in computer engineering grew to more than $34,000 in 1995, the federal government's entry-level salary for computer professionals with bachelor's degrees ranged from about $18,700 to $23,000 that year." To help overcome the disparity, NSA in 1996 raised the pay of its mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers. 

Agency officials, however, say it is not the money that attracts many NSA employees but "the unique nature of our work." In an effort to find new talent, NSA set up its own recruitment web page, which has been responsible for bringing in about 20 percent of its applicants. The agency also began posting job openings on employment web sites like Job Web and Career Mosaic. 

By the mid-1990s NSA had scaled back hiring to only about 100 new employees a year. A commission established to look into the intelligence community saw problems down the road in consequence of such drastic cutbacks in hiring. "This is simply insufficient to maintain the health and continuity of the workforce," the report said. It went on to warn that if the pattern continued, NSA would face a future in which large segments of its workforce would leave "at roughly the same time without a sufficient cadre of skilled personnel to carry on the work." 

NSA's decade-long diet had left it nearly a third lighter at the start of the new century. "Our budget has declined by almost thirty percent over the last ten years," said Thompson in late 1999. "And our workforce has gone down at a commensurate rate. But our requirements [the work assigned to NSA] have gone up and we have a hard time saying no, so it's hard for us to stop doing things." 

Thompson believes that Congress neglected NSA for many years because it had fewer high-cost defense contractors on its payroll than some other agencies, and thus far fewer lobbyists to pressure Congress for more money for NSA. "One of the reasons we don't get more support on the Hill for the budget," he said, "is we don't have a strong lobby in the defense industry. You know the NRO has a seven-billion-dollar budget. And anytime somebody talks about taking a nickel away from them there's people from Lockheed and Boeing—well, especially Boeing . . . and other big, big defense industrial contractors that are down there saying, 'You can't cut this because it's jobs in your district, Senator or Congressman. . . .' " 

"The point is," continued Thompson, "they [other agencies] have a very effective defense-industrial lobby because they spend a lot of money in the contract community. We don't have that. We used to have, ten or fifteen years ago. But we don't anymore, because we spend our money on four hundred or four thousand different contracts and it's hard to get a critical mass of people who want to go down and wave the flag for NSA when budget deliberations are going on." 

Speaking to a group of military communications officials, Kenneth Minihan once summed up NSA's budgetary problems with an old pilot's saying: "The nose is pointing down and the houses are getting bigger." 

Next
CHAPTER FOURTEEN BRAIN

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