Part 13 of 13 : Body of Secrets...Brain...Afterword...September 11th,2001

14

Brain

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It would be one of the most delicate operations ever performed. The doctors and technicians would gather early and work late into the night. Any mistake could be extremely serious. The patient's memory could be lost forever, or the ability to function severely damaged. Crypto City was about to undergo its first brain transplant. According to the director, nothing less than "the continued success of the agency's Sigint mission largely depended on this." The planning had taken years. NSA would create the largest, most powerful, and most secret electronic brain on earth.

But first it would have to build a specialized facility to house the new center. Then it would need to carefully transplant tons of massive and delicate supercomputers—more than 150—from the cavernous basement of OPS 1 to their new home, out of sight in a wooded corner of the secret city nearly a mile away. Whereas most government offices and large corporations measure in square feet the space taken up by their computers, NSA measures it in acres. "I had five and a half acres of computers when I was there," said Marshall Carter, director in the late 1960's. "We didn't count them by numbers; it was five and a half acres." Even though modern computers have more capacity and smaller footprints, one NSA employee more than a decade later commented, "It's double that today."

Once in place, the computers would be brought back to life and linked by a secure fiber optic spinal cord to the Headquarters/Operations Building complex—all without disrupting NSA's critical operations. When it was finally completed, in 1996, NSA's Supercomputer Facility held the most powerful collection of thinking machines on the planet. 

Standing in front of the new building on the afternoon of October 29, 1996, Kenneth Minihan held a pair of scissors up to a thin ribbon of red, white, and blue. No press releases had been issued, and even the invitations to the event gave no hint where the ceremony would actually take place. But then, that was precisely how the man in whose name the Tordella Supercomputer Facility was about to be dedicated would have wanted it. This would be the first NSA building to be named for a person. As the scissors sliced through the colorful ribbon, a handheld machine of elegant simplicity opened the way to a building of infinite complexity. 

The history of modern codebreaking and the history of computers are, to a large degree, coterminous. Yet because of its "policy of anonymity," NSA's role has been almost totally hidden. When the Association for Computing Machinery sponsored a commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding, NSA simply stayed away. Likewise, when computing pioneers gathered at the quarter-century anniversary meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers' Computer Society, NSA again exhibited an advanced case of shyness. 

But NSA's role in computer development has been, and continues to be, enormous. The man responsible for much of that work—as well as for the thick shroud of secrecy that still surrounds it—was Dr. Louis W. Tordella, NSA's keeper of the secrets. 

By the outbreak of the Second World War, the importance of machines to aid in code breaking was known but their use was limited. At that time the Signal Security Agency had only fifteen machines and twenty-one operators. But by the spring of 1945, the SSA was employing  1,275 operators and supervisors to work on 407 keypunch machines. 

Besides its off-the-shelf tabulating machines, the agency had specialized machines custom built for code breaking. Known as Rapid Analytical Machines (RAMs), they employed vacuum tubes, relays, high speed electronic circuits, and photo-electrical principles. They were the forerunners of the modern computer, but they were expensive and overspecialized. A number of them were built to attack a specific code or cipher, so if a cipher system was changed or abandoned, the machine was of little value. 

The Navy's Op-20-G contracted with Eastman Kodak, National Cash Register, and several other firms to design and build its RAMs. The Army's Signal Security Agency, on the other hand, worked closely with Bell Laboratories. Another major contractor during the war was IBM, which built a specialized attachment for its IBM tabulator, thereby increasing the power of the standard punch-card systems by several orders of magnitude. 

Two of the SSA's cryptanalytic machines were immense. Costing a million dollars apiece, an extraordinary sum at the time, they were capable of performing operations which, if done by hand in the old Black Chamber, would have required over 200,000 people. By the end of 1945 another monster machine was nearing completion; it had power equivalent to 5 million cryptanalysts. 

Tordella hoped the development by outside contractors of new, sophisticated cryptologic equipment would continue. But with no war to fight he found the contractors less willing to undertake the research. The rigorous security clearances, the oppressive physical security, and the limited usefulness of the equipment in the marketplace made many companies shy away from the field. Because of this, a group of former Navy officers, familiar with cryptography and signals intelligence, banded together to form Engineering Research Associates, which took on some of the Naval Security Group's most complex assignments. 

At about the same time, a group of engineers and mathematicians at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering completed an electronic marvel named ENIAC (for "electronic numerical integrator computer"), and thus gave birth to the computer era. ENIAC was an ungainly giant whose body was a good deal larger than its brain. Its total storage capacity was only twenty numbers, yet its 18,000 electron tubes took up the better part of a room thirty feet by fifty. Nevertheless, the machine offered tremendous possibilities in speed. 

The development of ENIAC led to a series of lectures on the theory of computers, presented at the Moore School and sponsored jointly by the Office of Naval Research and the Army's Ordnance Department. Among those attending the lectures, given between July 8 and August 31, 1946,  was Lieutenant Commander James T. Pendergrass, a colleague of Tordella's in the Naval Security Group, whose assignment was to assess the potential of computers in cryptography and signals intelligence.

Pendergrass came away from the lectures excited. Computers appeared to offer the flexibility that RAMs lacked. Whereas many of the RAMs were designed to handle one particular problem, such as breaking one foreign cipher system, computers could handle a whole range of problems. "The author believes that the general purpose mathematical computer, now in the design stage, is a general purpose cryptanalytic machine, " wrote Pendergrass. "A computer could do everything that any analytic machine in Building 4 can do, and do a good percentage of these problems more rapidly."

Soon after Pendergrass submitted his favorable report, negotiations began between the Security Group and Engineering Research Associates for the design and construction of the signals intelligence community's first computer. But what to name it? A yeoman overheard Tordella and his colleagues discussing ideas and suggested "Atlas," after the mental giant in the comic strip "Barnaby." Atlas lived up to its namesake. When it was delivered to the Security Group in December 1950, Atlas had an impressive capacity of 16,384 words; it was the first parallel electronic computer in the United States with a drum memory. A second, identical computer was delivered to NSA in March 1953. 

A key component of the machine was the vacuum tube. "We had the biggest collection of vacuum tube circuitry anyplace in the world there at one time," said former NSA research chief Howard Campaigne. "And we knew more about the life of vacuum tubes and the kinds of vacuum tubes that were used and how they should be maintained than just about anybody else." The vacuum tubes, he said, were as big as light bulbs. "And then you get a lot of light bulbs together and you have to have air-conditioning to cool them off. And so we were having fifteen tons of air-conditioning per machine." 

Tordella was not the only one impressed by the Pendergrass report. About the same time that he received it, a copy also landed on the desk of Sam Snyder at Arlington Hall, headquarters of the Army Security Agency. "A copy of this report hit my desk in November 1946," Snyder later recalled, "and my reaction was explosive. I immediately ran into the office of Dr. Solomon Kullback, my boss, and said something like, 'We have to get a machine like this. Think what it could do for us!' " Kullback assigned Snyder to investigate the possibilities; Snyder spent the next year meeting with experts such as John von Neumann, at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, and visiting institutions and private companies involved in computer research. "In the agency at that time," Snyder said, "money was no object; we could get whatever we wanted." 

Eventually the ASA built its own code breaking computer, which they named Abner. "We chose the name from Li'l Abner Yokum, the comic strip character who was a big brute, but not very smart," said Snyder, a longtime NSA computer expert, "because we believed that computers, which can be big and do brute-force operations, aren't very bright either; they can only follow simple instructions but can't think for themselves." Abner was originally given only fifteen simple programs, or "instructions" (later doubled to thirty). Nevertheless, when it was secretly completed in April 1952 it was the most sophisticated computer of its time. One could enter or extract information not only with the standard keypunched computer card but also with punched paper tape, magnetic tape, a parallel printer, a typewriter, or a console. 

At NSA Tordella became chief of NSA-70, which was responsible for high-level cryptanalysis. He and the others who were pushing for ever increasing computer power got a boost in 1954. James Killian, a Harvard professor exploring U.S. vulnerability to another surprise attack, concluded that 90 percent of war warnings would inevitably come from signals intelligence. But, he pointed out, since nuclear attack could come in a matter of minutes, it would be necessary to speed up the timeline on eavesdropping and code breaking to beat the clock. "From then on," said one former NSAer, "the focus of the Sigint process was on speed."

Several years later, in July 1956, one of the most costly as well as far reaching research programs ever undertaken by NSA was born. Its birthplace, however, was not a chalk-covered blackboard in Research and Engineering but a cocktail party. Over drinks, several high-level NSA equipment planners began discussing with Director Canine a number of the agency's perennial problems. At the top of the list was the battle between the code breakers, always looking to attack ever-increasing volumes of data, and the engineers, constantly attempting to design and build bigger and faster computers to meet those needs. No matter how powerful the new equipment, the engineers never seemed to catch up. Tordella began pushing for research into second-generation computer technology.

At the time, NSA was using the PACE 10, the first analog desktop computer used at the agency. It was self-contained, to the extent that the logic was in the interior. The output was a printing device. The plug-in units had a wire associated with them and each panel was set up to do a different mathematical function. For a fairly complex mathematical problem, one would plug in all the appropriate panels and hand-wire them together. The computer's operations manual boasted that once it was set up, a problem could be completed in fifteen to sixty seconds.

On the drawing board was a second-generation computer known as Harvest. It was designed to be an estimated hundredfold improvement in speed over the best current computers, but a completion date was still several years away. Exasperated by this situation, Canine exploded: "Dammit, I want you fellows to get the jump on those guys [computer companies]! Build me a thousand-megacycle machine! I'll get the money!"

The head of NSA's REMP (Research, Engineering, Math and Physics) Branch at the time was Howard Campaigne, who had helped uncover the high-level Russian "Fish" cipher system as part of TICOM. "After the ideas of Harvest were started," he said, "we in research tried to think of other things; and one of the suggestions that came up was that we ought to have a big program. We ought to attack it like the Manhattan Project. We ought to really go after it. And so we dreamed up this 'Project Lightning.' "

It was a time, according to Campaigne, when anything was possible. "We were always surprised. We had an idea which looked expensive and we'd go ahead and they'd always be encouraging—'Do it,' " he said. "During most of my career, we always had encouragement from above to do things. If you can see something to do, do it. We made some mistakes, but by and large, most of the things we attacked were at least partially successful." Among the successes was developing the first solid-state computer by replacing vacuum tubes with transistors. Then the transistors were replaced by magnetic cores in a computer named Bogart. 

But by the late 1960's, said Campaigne, things began to change. "In the late sixties we weren't getting encouragement. We were being told the budget had to be cut. We had to do without. ... I used to argue that it [the research-and-development percentage of the overall NSA budget] should be more than five percent. It ought to be up in the seven and eight percent [range]. . . . During the Lightning program, my budget had been as high as nine million dollars a year. And when I left in '69, that was my last full fiscal year, our budget was three million. It had been cut to a third. . . . And we had been pretty much cut down in contract work. All the contracts were much smaller than they had been. So when I became eligible to retire, I figured, Well, gee, no point in staying around here to cut budgets. So I went out." By the late 1990's, the research-and development portion of the overall NSA budget had dropped even further than during Campaigne's time, to less than 4 percent. 

Part of NSA's early success, said Campaigne, was a willingness to take chances. "What the research-and-development people are doing is just trying things out," he said. "They're doing experiments. And so you'd expect them to have a lot of failures and a few successes. Historically, as a matter of fact, they had many more successes than they should have." Later on, as NSA grew, the experiments became less bold. "The reason is they're so damned cautious. See, they're more cautious than we were. At  least, more cautious than we should have been. ... I guess it's because the researchers like to look good. They don't like to have a failure, even though they're there just to experiment. They like to succeed. But, in fact, somebody who was administering a research-and-development activity ought to say, 'You know, you guys are too damn cautious. Get out there and do some experimenting.' "

Campaigne's optimistic push-ahead-at-all-costs philosophy derived from his belief that every cipher machine, no matter how difficult, could eventually be broken. "There is no such thing as an unbreakable cipher," he said, "and it irritates me when people talk about such things without realizing it's nonsense. . . . But people keep thinking there might be such a thing as an unbreakable cipher."

Secrecy was always NSA's best ally when attempting to get money from Congress. "All those committee chairs were very friendly in those days, and secrecy impressed them," said Arthur Levenson, in charge of Russian code breaking at NSA and also a veteran of TICOM. "We got most of what we wanted, and a free hand in how we used it." Another former official said, of congressional oversight: "We didn't have any in those days." When General Canine was asked a question during a closed budget appropriations committee hearing, his favorite answer was, "Congressman, you don't really want to know the answer to that. You wouldn't be able to sleep at night." Said one former official, "And the members would look at each other and they were content with that." 

Awarded $25 million by Congress, and okayed by Eisenhower, NSA's five-year race to develop "thousand-megacycle electronics" was on. 

Lightning research began in June 1957. Contractors on the project, the largest government-supported computer research program in history up until then, included Sperry Rand, RCA, IBM, Philco, General Electric, MIT, the University of Kansas, and Ohio State. Though the project's primary goal was to increase circuitry capability by 1,000 percent, the end results went even further, extending the state of the art of computer science well beyond expectations. Research was conducted on cryogenic components, sub-miniaturization of components, and super-fast switching devices, called tunnel diodes.

One of the most rewarding by-products of Lightning was the boost it gave the development of NSA's mammoth Harvest complex, which was designed to be NSA's largest general-purpose computer. For years computers were designed to attack specific code breaking machines, such as the complex, Swiss-made Hagelin, which was used by many countries around the world. "We had in the past, before that time, we had built a special device for every problem," said Howard Campaigne. "And we'd gotten some very effective devices. But it always took a long time to build it. We had to formulate the problem and design the equipment, and get it constructed, and debugged, and all that had to take place when we ought to be operating."

But a super powerful computer like Harvest, it was hoped, would be able to attack not only the Hagelin machine but also a variety of cipher machines and systems from multiple countries. "As the computers became more sophisticated," said Solomon Kullback, one of William F. Friedman's original pioneers, it became possible to "program one of these high-speed general purpose computers so that it could simulate the action of the Hagelin and use them for the Hagelin problem." However, the computer would not be limited to the Hagelin machine.  

The original name for the computer was to be Plantation, but it was discovered that the White House had already taken the name to use as a code word for emergency relocation. "The idea . . . was to have a modular computer set up in which you'd have things which resembled barns and stables and that the plantation would be a center or central thing," recalled Howard Campaigne. "So they called it Harvest as part of this plantation group of things." 

Ironically, Solomon Kullback, who headed NSA's research-and development office for a decade, never had any real enthusiasm for computers until they started proving their worth. "He didn't interfere with us," said Campaigne. "He didn't try to stop us or anything like that, but he just had no personal enthusiasm for it at all. And later on he was willing to spend plenty of money on them. And there were a lot of people like that."

In 1955 IBM began planning its most ambitious computer, the Stretch. So huge was Stretch that IBM designers believed the market contained only two possible customers: NSA and the Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC signed up for the computer primarily because of its advantages in high-speed multiplication. But NSA, looking for more flexibility as well as the manipulation of great volumes of data, sent the engineers back to the drawing board for a more customized version. In April 1958 a final design was approved, and in February 1962 the agency took delivery of its long-awaited Stretch, now modified and considerably faster. "IBM regarded it as a bad experience because the Stretch as a whole they lost money on," said Howard Campaigne. "And since then, they've been very careful about getting into big computers. They just let Seymour Cray build them."

Once in place as the heart—or, more appropriately, brain—of NSA's enormous Harvest complex, even Stretch began to look somewhat diminutive. Attached was a variety of unusual, complex accessories that more than doubled the computer's original size. One was the Stream Processing Unit, which was able to take over a number of the more tedious and time-consuming cryptanalytic functions. A key to code breaking is the ability to quickly test encrypted text against every conceivable combination of letters in an alphabet. Because it may take millions of tries before the right combination of letters is found which breaks the cipher, speed is essential. "It was clear to us that one way of getting high capacity was to go fast," said Campaigne. An evaluation conducted by an NSA team concluded that Harvest was more powerful than the best commercially available computer by a factor of 50 to 200, depending on the particular application.

During World War II, the U.S. Navy's code breaking machine, known as the bombe, was able to perform tests on 1,300 characters per second. In other words, it was able to try 1,300 separate keys in the German lock every second, looking for the right one to pop it open. With the new Stream Processing Unit, that speed was increased to some 3 million characters each second—a 230,000 percent increase. Thus, to pick the lock, NSA could now try 3 million new keys every second until the right one was found—truly lightning speed. 

From one foreign cipher system alone, Harvest was able to process 7,075,315 intercepted messages of about 500 characters each, examining every possible combination, to see if they contained any 7,000 different target words or phrases on a watch list. The watch list might include such words as "submarine" or "battalion," or the names of key leaders. It was all done in just three hours and fifty minutes: an average of over 30,000 intercepted messages per minute. 

Like misers hoarding every last penny in a rusted treasure chest, NSA computer scientists hoard microseconds. "You save enough microseconds and lo and behold you've got a tremendously fast machine," recalled Solomon Kullback. 

Harvest not only increased NSA's speed, it also enlarged its memory, with a specially designed system that permitted the storage and retrieval of data at nearly 10 million characters per second.

Still another area advanced by Harvest was information retrieval, which used a unit known as Tractor. Tractor was capable of automatically locating desired information from a magnetic tape library of 480 reels, each capable of storing some 90 million characters. The machines would then mount, position, and thread the correct tape, and transfer the information at a then mind-boggling 1,128,000 characters per second—"a rate," said a secret NSA document at the time, "that is still beyond present computer tape technology." Whereas most magnetic tape contained 100 bits to the inch, NSA managed to pack 3,000 bits in the same space, and then whisk them past the reading heads at 235 inches per second. 

Feeding streams of intercepts from the worldwide listening posts to the analysts at NSA is a special highly secure Sigint Communications System. First opened on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the system carried over 25 million words a day by the mid-1960's. Analysts using Harvest would then further process the encrypted traffic. 

Another system bears critically important intelligence from an intercept operator at a listening post in a distant part of the world straight to the president of the United States at breakneck speed. The surprise launch by the Soviet Union of Sputnik in 1957 caused an earthquake within the intelligence community. At the time, it took an average of 8 hours and 35 minutes for a message containing critical intelligence to reach the White House. President Eisenhower demanded that the time be reduced to minutes. At a National Security Council meeting on August 27, 1958, attended by Eisenhower, CIA director Allen Dulles agreed that "there was little purpose in developing critical intelligence overseas unless we had the communications means to insure its rapid transmission to Washington."

A month later, in a meeting in the Oval Office with Eisenhower, Tordella proposed a system known as CRITICOMM. After Tordella outlined the costs and benefits, Eisenhower turned to the deputy secretary of defense and said, "Do it." Within six months NSA was able to reduce transmission time from more than 8 hours to 52 minutes. In another six months the agency was able to have a CRITIC, or critical intelligence message, on Eisenhower's desk within a brief thirteen minutes, regardless of where it had originated. Eventually the time shrunk to between three and five minutes. 

Finally, a system code named Rye provided remote access to Harvest, thus permitting analysts throughout NSA to access the main computer via several dozen distant terminals. "RYE has made it possible for the Agency to locate many more potentially exploitable cryptographic systems and 'bust' situations," said one secret report at the time. "Many messages that would have taken hours or days to read by hand methods, if indeed the process were feasible at all, can now be 'set' and machine decrypted in a matter of minutes. . . . Decrypting a large batch of messages in a solved system [is] also being routinely handled by this system."  

Few could have foreseen Harvest's bright future when the machine was first built. Because the complexity of the system baffled even many of the best analysts, it was originally considered a white elephant. During employee tours, the huge, boxy machine was pointed to and mocked. "It's beautiful, but it doesn't work," officials would scoff. But once the machine was fully understood, Harvest became so successful that it was used continuously for fourteen years. The agency finally switched to a more advanced system only in 1976. 

As computers more and more became essential in both code making and code breaking, worries developed over the progress the Soviet Union was making in the field, especially given its early lead in space exploration. In 1959 a top secret panel was created to investigate where the United States stood in its computer race with Russia. The results were encouraging. By then the U.S. government had about 3,000 computers, of which about 300 were high-performance machines valued at more than $1 million each. Russia, however, had fewer than 400 computers, of which only about 50 were large machines. 

Although for a time both countries attained comparable speed— the Soviet M-20 was about as fast as the IBM 709—the United States had left Russian computer scientists in the dust with the development of the transistor. Nevertheless, the secret panel's report advised against overconfidence. "The Soviet Union could achieve a computer production capability equivalent to that of the U.S. in 2—3 years, if they place the highest possible priority on the effort." But, the report added, "There is no evidence that they intend to establish such a priority." Nor, the report said, was the Soviet Union engaged in anything equivalent to Project Lightning. 

Following Harvest, NSA's brain, like that of a human, was divided into right and left hemispheres, code named Carillon and Lodestone. Carillon was at one time made up of IBM 360's, and later of four enormous IBM 3033's linked together and attached to three IBM 22,000-line-per-minute page printers. 

Even more powerful, however, was Lodestone. Dominating the center of a yellow-walled, gold-carpeted hall of computers, front-end interfaces, and mass storage units, was a decorative, 4½ -foot-wide, 6½ -foot-high semicircle of narrow gold and deep green panels surrounded by a black vinyl-upholstered bench-type seat. It appeared to be an ideal resting place for lunch or a mid-morning coffee break. It was, however, the fastest, most powerful, and most expensive computer of its time.

Built by Cray Research at its plant in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, a town also known for its Leinenkugel's beer and Chippewa Springs water, the $15 million CRAY-1 may be the ultimate testimony to the old proposition that looks are deceiving. Housed within what one wag once called "the world's most expensive love seat" were more than 200,000 integrated circuits, each the size of a thumbnail, 3,400 printed circuit boards, and 60 miles of wire. So compact was the five-ton, seventy square-foot unit that enough heat was generated per cubic inch to reduce the machine to a molten mass in seconds had it not been for a unique Freon cooling system using vertical aluminum-and-stainless-steel cooling bars that lined the wall of the computer chassis. 

The supercomputer was the brainchild of Seymour Cray, a shy, enigmatic engineer who rarely allowed interviews or pictures but was one of the most influential figures in computer science. The founder of Cray Research, Inc., Cray "is to supercomputers what Edison was to light bulbs," said Time in 1988, "or Bell to the telephone." When not in his laboratories, Cray could likely be found deep in the earth beneath his Wisconsin home, slowly tunneling toward the nearby woods. Eight feet high and four feet wide, the tunnel was lined with four-by-four cedar boards. When a tree once crashed through the roof of the tunnel, Cray turned the hole into a lookout with the installation of a periscope.

To Cray, the tunnel was both inspiration and recreation. "I work when I'm at home," he once told a visiting scientist. "I work for three hours and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go to work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the four-by-fours." Half kidding, Cray continued: "Now, as you can see, I'm up in the Wisconsin woods, and there are elves in the woods. So when they see me leave, they come into my office and solve all the problems I'm having. Then I go back up and work some more." According to John Rollwagen, then chairman of Cray Research, "The real work happens when Seymour is in the tunnel." 

Cray began his career by building code breaking machines in the 1950's with Engineering Research Associates, then headed by future NSA research chief and deputy director Howard Engstrom. Cray's dream was to build a number cruncher capable of 150 to 200 million calculations per second. It would have between 20 and 100 times the capacity of then current general-purpose computers—the equivalent of half a dozen IBM 370/195's. 

In the spring of 1976 the first CRAY-1 rolled out of the firm's production plant in Chippewa Falls and directly into the basement of NSA. A second was quietly delivered to NSA's secret think tank, the Communications Research Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis at Princeton University. 

The CRAY had a random access semiconductor memory capable of transferring up to 320 million words per second, or the equivalent of about 2,500 300-page books; NSA could not have been disappointed. And when it was hooked up to the computer's specialized input-output subsystem, the machine could accommodate up to forty-eight disk storage units, which could hold a total of almost 30 billion words, each no farther away than 80 millionths of a second. 

In a field where time is measured in nanoseconds—billionths of a second—seven years is an eternity. Thus it was with tremendous excitement that in June 1983 the agency made space in its basement for a new arrival from Chippewa Falls, the CRAY X-MP. Serial number 102 stamped on its side, the machine was the first X-MP to be delivered to a customer; NSA thus had the most powerful computer in the world at the time. The six-ton brain, which contained forty-five miles of wiring and required a fifty-ton refrigeration unit to keep it cool, was revolutionary. Rather than achieving its gains in speed simply by using a faster processor, the X-MP used two processors, working in parallel. Two separate jobs could be run at the same time, or one job could run on both processors. This capability made the X-MP five times faster than even the most advanced CRAY-1, the CRAY-IS/1000. 

To NSA, parallel processing was the wave of the future. Among the projects the agency was closely involved with was the Butterfly processor, which linked 148 microprocessors. Developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) Strategic Computing Program, Butterfly could have been scaled up to combine 256 or 512 or even 1,000 linked processors. 

Future testing included plans to link about 1 million processors. The X-MP arrived just in time. That same year NSA secretly put into operation an enormous worldwide computer network code named Platform. The system tied together, into a single cyber-web, listening posts belonging to NSA, GCHQ, and other Sigint agencies around the world, with NSA as the central brain. 

Two years later, in 1985, NSA's basement complex became even more crowded with the long-awaited arrival of the CRAY-2. With its bright red Naugahyde base and transparent, blue-tinted towers of bubbling liquid coolant, Seymour Cray's latest masterpiece looked more like bordello furniture than a super number cruncher in a code breaking factory. Nicknamed Bubbles, the $17.6 million computer was almost human, with cool, bubbling Fluorinert, also used as an artificial blood plasma, running through its system. The liquid was necessary to keep the enormous heat generated by electrons flowing through the tightly packed circuit boards from causing a meltdown. 

The unit of speed used in assessing supercomputers is the "flop," "floating point operations per second." Whereas it may take the average person several minutes to calculate with a pencil the correct answer to a single multiplication problem, such as 0.0572 x 8762639.8765, supercomputers are measured by how many times per second they can solve such problems. If it takes one second to come up with the answer, including where to place the "floating" decimal point, then the computer is said to operate at one flop per second. Bubbles, on the other hand, was able to perform at an astonishing 1.2 gigaflops, or 1.2 billion mathematical calculations a second. This made it up to twelve times faster than its predecessor and 40,000 to 50,000 times faster than a personal computer of that time.

By 1988 workers were laying wires and arranging power for still another new product from the backwoods of Wisconsin, the CBAY Y-MP. So dense were the chips on the new machine that engineers were now able to squeeze eight processors into a space originally designed for only one. Working together, and under ideal conditions, the processors were capable of performing between 2 billion and 4 billion operations a second. 

In the mid to late 1980's, the pace of supercomputer development was so fast that NSA barely had enough time to boot up each new mega machine before a newer one was wheeled into its basement "flop house."

The race to build the fastest supercomputer began to resemble a mainframe Grand Prix. Sleek, shiny, and ever more powerful new machines were continuously zooming to the starting line while engineers worked on ever more powerful and speedy designs. Nobody wanted to be left in the dust. In September 1987, Steve Chen, the Chinese-born computer superstar who lead the Cray Research design team on the XMP and Y-MP projects, left Cray after his machines became too expensive and risky. He was quickly hired by IBM. "Five years from now," boasted an IBM executive, "we should be at 100 billion giga flops. A problem that takes three months to do now, we want to do in a day." 

Off in the shadows, the Sandia National Laboratory, in Albuquerque, was tweaking a chunky little blue box. Three feet on a side and known as the Ncube, or hypercube, the computer was "massively" parallel, with 1,024 processors, each as powerful as a traditional minicomputer. In a test, Sandia asked the computer to calculate the stresses inside a building beam supported only at one end. A powerful minicomputer working twenty-four hours a day would have taken twenty years to arrive at an answer, but the lightning-fast Ncube accomplished it in a week. 

At ETA, a subsidiary of Control Data Corporation, a dark, bubbletopped box known as the ETA 10 was unveiled. An eight-processor powerhouse, it used computer chips that were smaller and denser than those used by Cray Research. Liquid nitrogen carried away the excess heat. And by using only one circuit board, the engineers were able to reduce the space that electrons have to travel during calculations. The end result was a $50 million black box designed to operate at a peak rate of 10 billion calculations per second, 30 times faster than previous supercomputers. 

Not to be outdone, Los Alamos National Laboratories, by stringing together an array of supercomputers and associated networks, was able to perform more computing work in a twenty-four-hour period than had been done by all of humanity before the year 1962. And that estimate was considered conservative by other researchers, who suggested that a date in the late 1970's might be more accurate. 

The speed of electrons, however, was not NSA's most immediate problem; the agency was also worried about the speed of the Japanese. Japan was the only other nation aggressively pursuing supercomputer development. In the summer of 1988, a gathering of leading computer science experts, among them NSA's director of supercomputer research, met to assess Japan's progress in supercomputers. If they felt confident when they walked into the meeting, they were more than a little nervous when they left. Starting only six years earlier, Japan had already matched or surpassed the United States in a field the United States invented and had been advancing for twenty years.

The main problem for the American supercomputer industry was dependence on Japanese computer companies—their arch-competitors in a cutthroat business—for critical parts, such as computer chips, for their machines. This was a result of the gradual abandonment of semiconductor manufacturing in the United States during the mid to late 1980's. In 1986, for example, NSA was virtually dependent on a Japanese company, Kyocera, for critical components that went into 171 of its 196 different computer chips, according to the minutes of a Department of Defense study group. When, without warning, Kyocera stopped making a component known as a ceramic package, used in a key chip, NSA began to shudder. 

In a worst-case scenario, Japanese computer manufacturers could slow down or cut off the supply of essential components to their American supercomputer competitors—and NSA. This fear led the panel to conclude that within a few years, "U.S. firms would be most fortunate if they found themselves only a generation or so behind." 

As a result of such worries, NSA, with the help of National Semiconductor, built its own $85 million microelectronics production and laboratory plant, known as the Special Processing Laboratory. Located in Crypto City, the ultra-modern, windowless, 60,000-squarefoot building first began producing chips in 1991. Today it employs several hundred people. The building contains 20,000 square feet of "class 10" clean rooms—rooms whose air is 10,000 times cleaner than normal air. The water must also be ultra-pure because the particles in the water can destroy a transistor. 

Building its own plant also solved another problem for NSA: the need for super secrecy in producing highly customized parts for use in the agency's unique code breaking machines. These components, "applications specific integrated circuits" (ASICs), are often the "brain" of a code breaking system, thus making outside procurement "a nightmare," said one NSAer. With the ability to squeeze 1 million or more transistors on a single piece of silicon, designers can now build entire algorithms on a chip—a complete crypto system on a piece of material many times smaller than a dime. For such a chip to fall into the wrong hands would be disastrous. 

So NSA added another new feature: a secret self-destruct mechanism. Developed by Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories, NSA's chips are shielded by special self-destructing coatings. "If a hostile agent tries to take off the lid," said one knowledgeable source, "the coating literally rips out the top [circuit] layer." 

Six months after the 1988 computer science panel meeting, fear over Japan's rapid push into the supercomputer industry once again surfaced. On December 6, 1988, Japan's Fujitsu—a key supplier of critical chips to Cray—announced a major new advance: a blisteringly fast computer with a theoretical top speed of 4 billion operations per second. This equaled and perhaps beat Cray's top-of-the-line machine, the Y-MP, which had been on the market for less than a year. The problem for NSA was that the Japanese company could easily sell the super fast computer to other nations, which might then use it to develop encryption systems far too fast for NSA's code breaking computers to conquer. 

But while Japanese companies were catching up and maybe even passing their American competitors in speed, the U.S. supercomputer industry was far ahead in both software development and the use of parallel processing. As fast as the Fujitsu computer was, it had only two processors. Cray and ETA had both developed machines with eight processors—eight brains, in a sense—which could simultaneously attack separate parts of a problem.

To Seymour Cray, sixteen brains were better than eight, and for several years he had been trying to prove it by building a sixteen processor CRAY-3. It was an expensive and time-consuming endeavor— too much so, it turned out, for Cray Research, the company he had founded but no longer owned. In May 1989, the two split. Seymour Cray took 200 employees and $100 million and moved to Colorado Springs to found Cray Computer, Inc., as a wholly owned subsidiary of Cray Research. Eventually, it was planned, Cray Computer would become independent. 

Like a race-car driver with his foot stuck to the accelerator, Cray continued to push for more and more speed; he hoped to break sixteen billion operations a second. The secret would be to make the hundreds of thousands of chips that would constitute the soul of the new computer not out of conventional silicon but out of a radical new material: gallium arsenide. Although it was more difficult and costly to work with, electrons could travel up to ten times as fast through the new compound as through silicon. 

But as "the Hermit of Chippewa Falls," as Cray was affectionately known, quietly pushed ahead in his new laboratory in Colorado Springs, the world around him began shifting and turning. The Cold War had ended and weapons designers were no longer shopping for supercomputers. The fat Reagan years of Star Wars were giving way to the Clinton era of cutbacks and deficit reduction. And industry was turning away from the diamond-encrusted CRAYs, made of a small number of super powerful processors, and toward less pricey massively parallel computers made up of thousands of inexpensive microprocessors. The enormously expensive, hand-built Formula One racers were being forced off the track by cheap stock cars packed with store-bought superchargers and sixteen-barrel carburetors.

At ETA Systems, which had pushed the supercomputer speed envelope with its ETA 10, 800 employees showed up for work on a spring Monday in 1989 to find the doors locked shut. The company had developed a super debt of $400 million. 

Four years later, Steve Chen folded up his new company, Supercomputer Systems, when IBM finally cut off funding for his SS-1. Partly funded by NSA, Chen had spent half a decade attempting to build a computer a hundred times faster than anything on earth. But in the end, the innovations were overtaken by excessive costs and endless missed deadlines. A few months after the company's doors closed, one of its former engineers driving past a farm spotted a strange but familiar column of metal. A closer look confirmed his worst fears: it was the outer frame for the SS-1, and it had been sold for scrap. 

In 1991, Thinking Machines Corporation delivered to NSA its first massively parallel computer—the Connection Machine CM-5, which the agency named Frostberg. Used until 1997, the futuristic black cube with long panels of blinking red lights looked like something left over from a Star Wars set. Just two years after the $25 million machine was installed, NSA doubled its size by adding 256 additional processor units. This allowed Frostberg to take a job and break it into 512 pieces and work on each piece simultaneously, at 65.5 billion operations a second. Equally impressive was the Frostberg's memory, capable of storing up to 500 billion words. 

By the time the CRAY-3 at last made its debut in 1993—clocking in at roughly 4 billion operations a second—there were no takers. Nearly out of money, the company spent a year looking for customers and finally landed a deal with its old partner, NSA. In August of 1994, the agency awarded Cray $4.2 million to build a highly specialized version of the CRAY-3 for signal processing and pattern recognition—in other words, eavesdropping and code breaking. Named the CRAY-3/Super Scalable System, the machine would become the brain of what has been dubbed "the world's ultimate spying machine." It would link two supercomputer processors with a massively parallel array of chips containing more than half a million inexpensive processors designed by NSA's Supercomputer Research Center. 

But while hoping for Cray to succeed, NSA scientists were also working in-house on new ideas. One was a processor called Splash 2, which, when attached to a general-purpose computing platform, was able to accelerate the machine's performance to super-Cray levels at only a fraction of the Cray cost. 

As Seymour Cray struggled to complete his CRAY-3, he was also in a race with his old parent company, Cray Research, which was building a successor to its Y-MP called the C-90. The company was also near completion on a powerhouse known as the T-90, which would operate at up to 60 billion operations per second. Meanwhile, Seymour Cray hoped to leapfrog his competitors once again with his CRAY-4, due out in 1996.

By the fall of 1994, work on the CRAY-4 was going surprisingly well. Cray Computer in Colorado Springs was predicting a completion date in early 1995 with a machine with twice the power of the CRAY-3 at one fifth the cost. There was even talk of a CRAY-5 and CRAY-6 before the planned retirement of Seymour Cray. Which was why the yellow tape came as such a shock. When employees came to work on the morning of March 24, 1995, they were first confused to see the yellow police tape sealing the doors. But when they saw the white flag that had been run up the flagpole, they did not need a supercomputer to conclude that the end had finally arrived. The man with the unlimited ideas that reached to the stars had tumbled to the bottom of his finite bank account.

Ever optimistic, Seymour Cray pulled together a few of his most loyal followers, scraped together some money from their own bank accounts, and formed SRC (Seymour Roger Cray) Computers. Cray felt almost liberated at this chance to "start from a clean sheet of paper." It was also, he believed, a chance to finally break the speed barrier by building the first tera flop supercomputer, capable of a trillion mathematical operations a second—12,000 times more than his CRAY-1. 

But the enemy had landed. In the spring of 1996, even the U.S. government had turned its back on all the Cray companies and awarded a $35 million contract to the Japanese computer giant NEC for its 128- processor SX-4 supercomputer. The SX-4 would go to the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The agency was worried because meteorological centers in Australia, Canada, England, and elsewhere were installing systems that by January 1998 would be capable of between 20 and 80 billion operations a second. And Cray Research, the agency concluded, was just not producing computers fast enough. "Simply put," said William Buzbee, head of the weather center, "Cray Research lost this procurement because their offer had unacceptable technical risk." 

Others, too, knew that despite the never-say-die bravado and the endless promises of zillions of flops, the luster was at last disappearing from Cray's blinding star. "The rules changed when it became clear that Cray Computer Corp. wasn't going to make it," said John Mashey, director of systems technology at Silicon Graphics. "It's like watching your favorite quarterback, who won the Super Bowl many times. But it's not 1976 anymore—his knees are gone and those three-hundred-pound defensive tackles are fierce. While he keeps getting up, it's agonizing to watch and you really wish he could have quit on a high." 

A few months later, while returning from a brief trip to a software store, Cray was seriously injured when his black Grand Cherokee was struck by another car and rolled over three times. Two weeks later, on October 5, 1996, the shy maverick who hand-built the fastest machines on earth, with the meticulous care and fine craftsmanship of a Swiss watchmaker, died, never having regained consciousness. His ashes were scattered among the cragged peaks and somber valleys of the Colorado mountains. They had served as his inspiration, and as silent comforters, during his last years. "In the days before PCs brought mega flops to the masses," said one computer expert, "Cray was the computer industry's closest equivalent to a rock star." 

Sadly, only months before Cray's death, the daring company he had given birth to in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, decades earlier, also died. Following the worst financial year of its life, in which it was forced to cut nearly a quarter of its employees, and facing an uncertain future, Cray Research called it quits. It was acquired by Silicon Graphics, Incorporated—later known simply as SGI—a Mountain View, California, manufacturer of high-performance workstations, the sort of machines that became Cray's greatest competitor. "Cray represents the last of the 1980's pure plays in the supercomputer market," one market analyst said wistfully. "There are no other major players left standing from the supercomputer battles of the 1980's and 1990's." 

In fact, there was one. The shakeout and the death of Seymour Cray left a single independent to fight the army of "killer micros," the massively parallel microprocessors that turned the budget-draining, high-performance supercomputer into an endangered species. The large, rumpled man with the Don Quixote dream was Burton Smith, whose company, Tera Computer, stunned many in the field by building a machine that in 1997 set a world speed record for sorting integers. Burton's idea was to increase speed by decreasing the waiting time it took for processors to be sent new data on which to work. This, Burton believed, would overcome the Achilles' heel of powerful computing—the gap between a computer's short-term theoretical "peak" speed and its long-term "sustained" speed. 

Smith no doubt had his eye on NSA as a key future customer for his machines, which would cost as much as $40 million. He spent three years working for NSA's Supercomputer Research Center before leaving in 1988 to found Tera. Much of his early money, in fact, came from NSA's partner, DARPA. 

Encouraged by Smith's research, a "senior intelligence official" approached Sid Karin, the director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and asked him to help support Tera. "We don't have a lot of innovative architects like Burton Smith and Seymour Cray," the intelligence official told Karlin, "and they need to be nurtured and supported." So, in 1998, Smith installed his first system in the San Diego center. 

Nevertheless, Smith still has his skeptics. One well-known computer designer fondly refers to the Tera system as "Burton's folly." And even Smith acknowledges the long odds: "Most people think we're out of our mind." Still, noted one observer, "Burton Smith is the last man standing."

As the supercomputer business began crashing, worries increased at NSA. For decades the agency had quietly underwritten a large portion of the industry; the massive number cruncher were the engines that powered its code breaking machines. Now agency officials watched S.G.I, following its takeover of Cray, like spectators at a slow-motion automobile accident. Within a year and a half of the acquisition the company was in turmoil. S.G.I posted a loss of over $50 million, a major layoff was announced, and the longtime chief executive officer resigned. Noting that only three years earlier the company had produced the graphics that made the motion picture Jurassic Park possible, one reporter quipped, "The question was whether the company was in danger of going the way of the dinosaur."

By 1999, S.G.I looked like a boxer struggling to rise before the final count. Its stock had plunged more than 20 percent, another chief executive officer had called it quits, and the firm said it would cut as many as 3,000 jobs and spin off its Cray supercomputer division. NSA was worried: it had contracted with the company to build its newest supercomputer, the CRAY SV2. The decision was made to open the drawer of the cash register. "The United States is committed to maintaining and building on its long-held position as the global leader in super computing," said NSA's chief scientist, George Cotter. "These powerful computers are absolutely essential to U.S. national security interests. To that end, the U.S. government is committing significant support to SGI's CRAY SV2 program." 

Cotter also noted the critical need for NSA to continue similar joint supercomputer projects. "The government support reflects a continuing need for government-industry cooperative development of critical technologies for high-end computing," he said. "The SV2 will include technology jointly developed with the U.S. government. This will considerably extend the combination of custom-designed high-end processors with the high-speed memory access that current Cray supercomputers offer." The new system was expected to dramatically extend the capability of NSA's supercomputers with exceptional memory bandwidth, interconnections, and vector-processing capabilities. Its peak speed was estimated to be in the tens of tera flops, faster than any supercomputer in existence.

In 2000 the supercomputer business came full circle. Like two broke gamblers at a racetrack putting their change together for one last bet, Burton Smith's Tera Computer acquired Seymour Cray's former Cray Research from SGI. Thus was reborn Cray, Inc., once again an independent company. It was good news for NSA. One report said the agency was involved in the deal "because it wants at least one U.S. company to build state-of-the-art supercomputers with capabilities beyond the needs of most business customers." Work would continue on NSA's SV2, with delivery scheduled for 2002. 

At the same time, Cray began work on a new Department of Defense contract, one to upgrade a CRAY T3E-1200 supercomputer. With the addition of 816 processors to its existing 272 processors, the new machine will be the largest Cray system ever built, with 1,088 processors and a record speed of 1.3 tera-flops—1.3 trillion calculations per second. Four years after Seymour Cray died, a machine bearing his name would at last break the tera -barrier. 

But despite the encouraging signs, the supercomputer shakeout had convinced many at NSA of the need to move away from the insecurity of the outside world and to return to the black computer laboratories of Crypto City. 

The massive brain transplant began in February 1997, as the first supercomputer began its slow trip from the basement of OPS 1. Its destination was the top floor of the Tordella Supercomputer Facility, hidden away in a wooded corner of Crypto City. More than a year later, the final supercomputer was carefully nudged into place and connected by a spinal cord of secure fiber optic nerves to the main body of the agency, a mile away. Once the operation was completed, NSA possessed the most powerful electronic brain on earth. 

Surrounded by thick woods and protected by guard posts, double fences, and concrete barriers, the Tordella Supercomputer Facility, is located on Crypto City's Ream Road, a street named after NSA's fourth deputy director. The nearly windowless outside walls of the 183,000- square-foot facility are decorated with attractive, light-colored enameled metal panels. The life-support equipment is housed on the first floor— an 8,000-ton chilled water plant, mechanical and electrical support facilities, and 29-mega-volt-amperes of electrical power, enough to supply half of Annapolis.

The top floor's five rooms contain, among other things, the Computer Operations Command Center and approximately 150,000 magnetic tapes moved there from storage in "silo-farms" back in the main part of Crypto City. Supercomputers, such as the CRAY Y-MP EL and the Silicon Graphics Power Challenge, occupy the rest of the floor. Also installed in 1999 was the new IBM RS/6000 SP. This is a faster version of the system that powered the company's supercomputer "Deep Blue," which won a grueling six-game chess match against virtuoso Garry Kasparov in 1997. The extra power and speed come from IBM's new Power S microprocessor, which is capable of crunching through 2 billion instructions per second—more than double the power of the Power 2  Super Chip. The computer is the centerpiece for a system IBM called Deep Computing. One of its primary uses is "data mining," searching through enormous quantities of data, such as intercepted communications or complex cipher systems, and coming up with the answer. The RS/6000 SP, said IBM executive David Turek, is "super computing at your fingertips." 

Moving the tremendous amounts of information into and out of the supercomputers, like the ultimate jukebox, is the massive dodecagonal Automated Cartridge System. As big as a small room, and weighing more than four tons, this high-speed storage device can hold 6,000 cartridges containing a total of 300 terabytes of information—the equivalent of more than 150 billion pages of text. According to NSA, this is the equivalent of one and a half million years of the Wall Street Journal; it is also enough pieces of paper to circle the globe 3,000 times, or to fill a wall of books stacked eleven deep and running from New York City to Los Angeles. 

The robotic arm has two cameras and a "hand"; the cameras find the bar code of the requested cartridge, and the hand moves it to the retrieval area, where the needed cartridge can be extracted. The arm can move cartridges in and out of the computers at the rate of 450 an hour. 

Such a system is necessary when one considers NSA's information storage capabilities. To store the massive amounts of data flowing in from its worldwide listening posts, NSA a few years ago turned to E-Systems, long a key contractor on secret projects for the agency. The solution was to link several computers the size of telephone booths. When completed the system was capable of storing 5 trillion pages of text—a stack of paper 150 miles high. Included was a new retrieval system that permitted the access of any piece of information almost instantly. 

As the supercomputer industry began crumbling around it, NSA turned inward, creating a top secret facility for developing its own classified computers. Known as the Supercomputer Research Center (S.R.C), it was built in 1984 in order to leapfrog over the rest of the world in computer power, as Project Lightning had thirty years earlier. Only this time, the work would be done in total secrecy. According to Lieutenant General Lincoln D. Faurer, the NSA's director at the time, a principal goal of the S.R.C was to build a new generation of computers that would be 10,000 times faster than the current generation.

Over the years millions of dollars would go into research on subjects such as specialized parallel processing algorithms, which would give computers the super speed needed to break increasingly powerful foreign encryption systems. At the same time, S.R.C would develop ways to push American cryptographic systems beyond the reach of hostile code breakers. Little, if any, of the research done by the S.R.C would ever see the light of day outside of Crypto City, so NSA would be far ahead in the race for the fastest and most powerful computers on earth. 

Constructed at a cost of $12 million on a twenty-acre site at the University of Maryland's Science and Technology Center in Bowie, the S.R.C is actually operated by the Communications Research Division (C.R.D), part of the Institute for Defense Analysis. For more than four decades the C.R.D has run NSA's own highly secret think tank. Originally known as the NSA Research Institute, it was first approved by President Eisenhower in 1958. Its purpose was to carry out long-range, theoretical, and advanced research in mathematical and statistical problems related to NSA's code breaking and eavesdropping missions. The institute also conducted a special summer program that brought together members of the academic community and introduced them to members of the cryptologic community.

At one point, in 1965, the institute developed a unique piece of code breaking machinery that proved enormously successful. "That one piece of equipment," said a secret 1965 NSA report, "by itself, has been judged to be well worth the total cost of the Institute thus far." 

Among the early directors of the institute was Dr. J. Barkley Rosser, a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, noted for his work in symbolic logic and number theory. Dr. A. Adrian Albert, dean of the division of physical sciences at the University of Chicago and an expert in linear algebra and number theory, followed him in 1961. 

Originally, the NSA Research Institute was located behind a high wall  on the campus of Princeton University. But as a result of the antiwar protests of the 1960's, NSA, fearing for the continued secrecy and security of the institute, moved it to a boxy, three-story brick building virtually hidden in an isolated wooded area off campus. Windowless except for the third floor, the mysterious building has no signs to indicate the name or nature of the occupant. Eventually, to further hide its connection to NSA, the Research Institute's name was changed to the Communications and Computing Center. Specializing in such esoteric code breaking and eavesdropping disciplines as crypto-mathematics, crypto-computing, speech research, and special signals processing techniques, the IDA-C3I, as it is sometimes known, received $34 million in funding in 1994 and employed a technical staff of 149.

In addition to the Supercomputer Research Center, NSA also has a Laboratory for Physical Sciences (L.P.S), which is part of the agency's Directorate of Technology. Like the NSA Research Institute, L.P.S was born in the 1950's, when the NSA's Scientific Advisory Board recommended that the agency establish a "window on the world of academia and academic research in the physical sciences." As a result, the agency collaborated with the University of Maryland to create the L.P.S, with quarters built adjacent to the school's College Park campus. 

In 1992 the L.P.S moved into a new, nondescript 63,500-square-foot building on Green-mead Drive in College Park. Leased from the university for $480,000 a year, the facility, near a Moose lodge, draws little attention and does not appear in the campus telephone directory. "We don't know what they do there," said the administrator of the veterinary center next door. 

The lab was built at a cost of $10.9 million; its ultra-advanced technology is designed to fast-forward NSA's ability to eavesdrop. Using magnetic microscopy, scientists are able to study the minute tracks on magnetic tape and greatly increase data density, thus enabling intercept operators to pack ever more conversations into their recorders. Increasing computer speed is also critical. To achieve this acceleration, the L.P.S contains a state-of-the-art molecular beam epitaxy (M.B.E) facility to develop miniature lasers, optical amplifiers, and other components made out of gallium arsenide. 

But speed equals heat. Thus the L.P.S is also pushing the limits on such technologies as the development of synthetic diamonds, which are many times more efficient for heat conduction than copper and far less expensive than real diamonds. For example, an integrated circuit mounted on ordinary ceramic will turn a very warm 87 degrees centigrade when its surroundings are at room temperature. One mounted on synthetic diamonds, however, will reach only 54 degrees centigrade, allowing NSA's code breaking machines to be relatively cool as well as fast. 

Speed not only equals heat, it also equals massive demand for data storage. Increasing use of space-eating multimedia files compounds the problem, as does the need to make the information available to an ever larger group of customers. One solution was Project Oceanarium, which for the first time automated the storage of NSA's masses of multimedia Sigint reports. 

At the same time, Oceanarium modernized the way in which reports were retrieved and distributed. Where once each spy agency jealously guarded its individual intelligence files behind thick fortresses, today the buzz phrase is "sharable databases." Through Oceanarium, NSA's dark secrets can now be retrieved not only over its own internal intranet, Webworld, but throughout the intelligence community via highly classified programs such as Intelink. 

Because the breadth and depth of NSA's data storage sea is finite, scientists are turning to newer ways to narrow the rivers of information emptying into it. Among the most promising are microscopic magnets, only one molecule in size. Scientists at Xerox believe that such a magnet, made of a special combination of manganese, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen, may be able to pack data thousands or even millions of times more densely than today's systems of memory storage. Using these molecule-sized magnets, experts believe, it may someday be possible to store hundreds of gigabytes of data—millions of typed pages—on an area no larger than the head of a pin.

By 2001, NSA's tape and disk storage capacity approached a density of ten gigabytes per square inch—the equivalent of more than half a million typed, double-spaced pages. But the closer data are packed, the harder they are to erase and the more chance that telltale secrets will remain behind on reused media. Therefore, another key area of research at NSA's LPS is exploring the microscopic properties of data storage and erasure to find more effective ways to rid used tapes and hard drives of all their old secrets. According to computer expert Simson Garfinkel, tiny pieces of a hard drive can still contain sizable amounts of information. For instance, a 1/16-inch-square piece of a six-gigabyte hard drive can hold 750,000 bytes—enough to fill a 300-page book. "A spy could remove a hard disk, grind it up, and smuggle out the data in little pieces like pocket lint," said Garfinkel. To solve the problem, NSA developed a drive controlled disk sanitation device, which attaches to the head disk assembly and can completely eradicate the sensitive information used on disks and drives. 

Inside NSA's Supercomputer Research Center, the secret race for the fastest computer seems almost unworldly. In 1994 and 1995 NSA scientists participated in a series of meetings devoted to exploring the feasibility of a great leap forward in computer technology. The goal was to advance from billions, past trillions, to more than a quadrillion operations a second pentaflop speed—within two decades. 

Among the ideas developed by NSA for achieving speeds of over a quadrillion (1015) mathematical operations a second was the placement of processors in the middle of memory chips. Processor-in-memory chips, or P.I.Ms, have the advantage of reducing the time it normally takes for electronic signals to travel from the processors to the separate memory chips. These P.I.M chips are now among the products manufactured by the agency's Special Processing Lab.

By 2001, the SRC had long since broken the teraflop barrier and was approaching petaflop speeds—at which point time is measured in femtoseconds, the shortest events known to science. With such extraordinary speed, a machine would be capable of pounding a stream of intercepted, enciphered text with a quadrillion—a million billion— possible solutions in the time it takes to wink. Original estimates by scientists were that the outside world would reach that point sometime around 2010, but IBM intends to cut the wait in half with a mega-supercomputer dubbed Blue Gene. 

Over five years, between 2000 and 2005, the company plans to build the fastest computer on earth—500 times faster than anything currently in existence. "It will suck down every spare watt of electricity and throw off so much heat that a gas turbine the size of a jet engine is required to cool it off," said one report. According to the company, the computer would be about forty times more powerful than the aggregate power of the forty fastest supercomputers in the world today—or 2 million times more powerful than the fastest desktop in existence. 

The ultimate goal of Blue Gene is to solve a puzzle of a different sort from those at NSA—although NSA may also secretly be a customer. Blue Gene's singular objective is to try and model the way a human protein folds into a particular shape. Because proteins are the molecular workhorses of the human body, it is essential to discover their molecular properties. In a sense, Blue Gene is like NSA's old RAMs, which were designed to attack one specific encryption system. 

When completed, Blue Gene will consist of sixty-four computing towers standing six feet high and covering an area forty feet by forty feet. Inside will be a mind-boggling one million processors. The target speed is a petaflop. 

When NSA crosses the petaflop threshold, if it hasn't already, it is unlikely that the rest of the world will know. By 2005 the S.R.C, with years of secret, highly specialized development accumulated, will likely be working with computers operating at exaflop speeds—a quintillion operations a second—and pushing for zettaflop and even yottaflop machines, capable of a septillion (102*) operations every time a second hand jumps. Beyond yottaflop, numbers have not yet been named. "It is the greatest play box in the world," marveled one agency veteran of the NSA's technology capability. "They've got one of everything." 

Operating in the exaflop-and-above world will be almost unimaginable. The key will be miniaturization, an area in which NSA has been pushing the theoretical envelope. By the mid-1990's, NSA's Special Processing Laboratory had reduced the size of a transistor so much that seventy of them would fit on the cross section of a human hair. NSA is also attempting to develop a new generation of computer chips by bombarding light-sensitive material with ions to etch out microscopic electronic circuit designs. Using ion beams instead of traditional light in the process provides the potential for building far smaller, more complex, more efficient chips.

In the late 1990's NSA reached a breakthrough when it was able to shrink a supercomputer to the size of a home refrigerator-freezer combination. Eventually the machine was pared down to the size of a small suitcase, yet its speed was increased by 10 percent. In 1999, a joint NSA and DARPA program demonstrated that portions of a supercomputer could be engineered to fit into a cube six inches on a side—small enough to fit into a coat pocket. The circuitry was made of diamond-based multi-chip modules and cooled by aerosol spray to remove the 2,500 watts of heat from the system. 

But to reach exaflop speed, computer parts—or even computers themselves—may have to be shrunk to the size of atoms, or even of subatomic particles. At the S.R.C, scientists looking for new and faster ways to break into encryption systems have turned to quantum computing. This involves studying interactions in the microscopic world of atomic structures and looking for ways to harness individual atoms to perform a variety of different tasks, thereby speeding up computer operations to an unthinkable scale. 

NSA has had a strong interest in quantum computing as far back as 1994, when Peter Shor, a mathematician at Bell Laboratories, which has long had a close and secret relationship with the agency, discovered the code breaking advantages of the new science. Since then, NSA has spent about $4 million a year to fund research at various universities, and put additional money into studies at government laboratories.

Operated at top speed, a quantum computer could be used to uncover pairs of enormously large prime numbers, which are the "passwords" for many encryption systems. The largest number that ordinary supercomputers have been able to factor is about 140 digits long. But according to another Bell Labs scientist, Lov K. Grover, using quantum computing, 140-digit-long numbers could be factored a billion times faster than is currently possible. "On paper, at least," said Glover, "the prospects are stunning: ... a search engine that could examine every nook and cranny of the Internet in half an hour; a 'brute-force' decoder that could unscramble a D.E.S [Data Encryption Standard—the encryption standard used by banks and most businesses] transmission in five minutes." 

A quantum computer could also be used to speed through unfathomable numbers of intercepted communications—a "scan" in NSA speak—searching for a single keyword, a phrase, or even, with luck, a "bust." Long the secret leading to many of NSA's past code breaking successes, a bust is an abnormality—sometimes very subtle—in a target's cryptographic system. For example, it may be an error in a Russian encryption program, or a faulty piece of hardware, or a sloppy transmission procedure. Once such a hairline crack is discovered, NSA code-breakers, using a massive amount of computer power in what is known as a brute force attack, can sometimes chisel away enough of the system to expose a golden vein of secret communications.

A breakthrough into quantum computing came in April 1998, when researchers at MIT, IBM, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Oxford in England announced they had succeeded in building the first working quantum computers. The processor consisted of a witches' brew of hydrogen and chlorine atoms in chloroform. Digital switches were shrunk down to the smallest unit of information, known as a quantum bit, or qubit. Where once a traditional computer bit would have to be either, for example, 0 or 1, a qubit could be both simultaneously. Instead of just black or white, a qubit could become all the colors of the rainbow.

According to John Markoff, who has long followed the issue for the New York Times, another milestone came in July 1999. That was when researchers at Hewlett-Packard and the University of California at Los Angeles announced that they had succeeded in creating rudimentary electronic logic gates—one of the basic components of computing— only a single molecule thick. Four months later, scientists at Hewlett-Packard reported they had crossed another key threshold by creating rows of ultra-microscopic conductive wires less than a dozen atoms across.

Translated into practical terms, a quantum computer could thus perform many calculations simultaneously, resulting in a hyper increase in speed. Now, instead of a supercomputer attempting to open a complex cipher system—or lock—by trying a quadrillion different keys one after another, a quantum computer will be able to try all quadrillion keys simultaneously. Physicists speculated that such machines may one day prove thousands or even millions of times faster than the most powerful supercomputer available today. 

The discovery was greeted with excitement by the code breakers in Crypto City. "It looked for a long time like a solution without a problem," said NSA's Keith Miller. At Los Alamos, where NSA is secretly funding research into the new science, quantum team leader Richard J. Hughes added: "This is an important step. What's intriguing is that they've now demonstrated the simplest possible algorithm on a quantum computer."

Also heavily involved in molecular-scale electronics, known as moletronics, is DARPA, long NSA's partner in pushing computing past the threshold. Scientists working on one DARPA program recently speculated that it may soon be possible to fashion tiny switches, or transistors, from tiny clusters of molecules only a single layer deep. Such an advance, they believe, may lead to computers that would be 100 billion times as fast as today's fastest PCs. According to James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University who is working on molecular scale research, "A single molecular computer could conceivably have more transistors than all of the transistors in all of the computers in the world today."

On the other side of the city, however, the code makers welcomed the news with considerable apprehension. They were worried about the potential threat to NSA's powerful cipher systems if a foreign nation discovered a way to harness the power and speed of quantum computing before the United States had developed defenses against it. By 1999, for example, Japan's NEC had made considerable progress with the development of a solid-state device that could function as a qubit. "We have made a big step by showing the possibility of integrating quantum gates using solid-state devices," said NEC's Jun'ichi Sone. "It takes one trillion years to factorize a two-hundred-digit number with present supercomputers," he said. "But it would take only one hour or less with a quantum computer." 

As intriguing as quantum computing is, perhaps the most interesting idea on how to reach exaspeed and beyond came out of the series of "great leap forward" meetings in which the NSA took part in the mid-1990's. The computer of the future—already with a circulatory system of cool, bubbling Fluorinert, an artificial blood plasma—may be constructed partly out of mechanical parts and partly out of living parts. 

"I don't think we can really build a machine that fills room after room after room and costs an equivalent number of dollars," said Seymour Cray, one of those at the meetings. "We have to make something roughly the size of our present machines but with a thousand times the components." One answer to scaling down to the nanometer, according to Cray, was to fabricate computing devices out of biological entities. At the same time, other biological processes could be used to manufacture non-biological devices—for example, bacteria could be bio-engineered to build transistors. 

By 2001, researchers at MIT were actively attempting to marry the  digital with the biological by altering the common E. coli bacterium to function as an electronic circuit. Such a melding would produce a computer part with the unique ability to continually reproduce itself. Through such a process, enormous numbers of nearly identical processors could be "grown." "We would like to make processors by the wheelbarrow-load," said MIT computer scientist Harold Abelson. Abelson and his colleagues are hoping to someday map circuitry onto biological material, in a process they call amorphous computing, thus turning living cells into digital logic circuits. However, since the cells could compute only while alive, millions or billions of the tiny bio-components would have to be packed into the smallest spaces possible. 

Bell Labs, part of Lucent Technologies, is also perusing the idea of a "living" computer by creating molecular-size "motors" out of DNA— motors so small that 30 trillion could fit into a single drop of water. According to Bell Labs physicist Bernard Yurke, it might eventually be possible to bind electronic components to DNA. Then, by linking the DNA strands together, a computer could be created with incredible speed and storage capacities. 

Eventually NSA may secretly achieve the ultimate in quickness, compatibility, and efficiency—a computer with petaflop and higher speeds shrunk into a container about a liter in size, and powered by only about ten watts of power: the human brain. 

AFTERWORD 

"This is Morning Edition from NPR News. I'm Bob Edwards. The fate of Afghan opposition leader Ahmed Shah Massoud remains uncertain two days after he was attacked in his home in northern Afghanistan. Massoud's followers insist that the assassination attempt failed and that he is still alive. But there's widespread speculation that he died from his wounds. NPR's Michael Sullivan reports." 

On the second floor of a handsome brick house on Fort Meade's Butler Avenue, a clock radio, as usual, turned National Public Radio on at 5:45 A.M. Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency, slowly adjusted his eyes to the early morning twilight. It was September 11, 2001, a Tuesday in early autumn. The sultry air of summer had turned crisp and dry, and yellow school buses again were prowling suburban streets like aged tigers. 

"This is not the first time that Ahmed Shah Massoud's enemies have tried to kill him," said Michael Sullivan from Islamabad, Pakistan, as the broadcast continued. "A spokesman said there have been numerous attempts by the Taliban to assassinate the charismatic commander in the past few years. . . . Opposition spokesmen say Massoud was seriously injured when two suicide bombers posing as journalists.

Suicide bombing, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban. If Michael Hayden was listening, it was not a good way to start the morning. Long one of NSA's chief targets, bin Laden had been eluding the agency's eavesdroppers since 1998, when an American missile attack on his compound in Afghanistan made him think twice about using satellite communications. Until then, his voice had been heard frequently within the agency's thick, copper-lined walls. For highly cleared visitors from other intelligence agencies, officials would even play recordings of bin Laden chatting with his mother in Syria.

In 1996, bin Laden was planning to move his headquarters from Sudan to remote Afghanistan, where communications would be a serious problem. But his man in London, Khalid al-Fawwaz, had a solution. "To solve the problem of communication," he wrote to bin Laden that year, "it is indispensable to buy the satellite phone." Bin Laden agreed, and al-Fawwaz, who would later be charged with conspiring with bin Laden to murder American citizens abroad (as of this writing, he is awaiting extradition from England), turned to a student at the University of Missouri at Columbia, Ziyad Khalil. Khalil had become a spokesman for the rights of Muslim students at the university, and he agreed to help al-Fawwaz purchase the $7,500 satellite phone, although there is no evidence that he knew he was procuring it on behalf of bin Laden. After doing some research, Khalil then bought the phone from a firm on New York's Long Island. 

Another break for bin Laden came on the evening of April 3, 1996, when a powerful Atlas rocket slipped gracefully into the sky from Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex 36A. Sitting atop the spacecraft, beneath a protective clam-shell sheath, was the first of a new generation of Inmarsat communications satellites on its way to geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles over the Indian Ocean. The satellite, owned by the International Maritime Satellite Organization, would be used largely by ships at sea as well as people in isolated parts of the world, such as oil explorers. 

Over the next two years, the phone was used for hundreds of calls to London, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Sudan. Bin Laden's telephone number—00873682505331—also turned up in the private phone books and date planners of terrorists in Egypt and Kenya. It was even used, say investigators, to disseminate bin Laden's February 1998 fatwah that declared American civilians should be killed. From 1996 through 1998, Khalil ordered more than 2,000 minutes of telephone airtime for bin Laden's phone. 

Eventually the phone was also used by bin Laden and his top lieutenants to orchestrate the bombings of the two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. In October 1997, Ibrahim Eidarous, currently awaiting extradition from England as part of the embassy bombing conspiracy, sent word from London to Afghanistan asking Amman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's right-hand man, to call 956375892. This was a mobile phone in London belonging to yet another alleged embassy bombing co-conspirator, Abdul Bary, who is also awaiting extradition from London. The following day, bin Laden's satellite phone was used to make several calls to that phone number in London. 

But even though NSA had the capability to intercept many conversations to and from bin Laden and other members of Al Qaeda— including some of those allegedly involved in the bombing of the American embassies in East Africa—the information was not enough to prevent the attacks. 

Many of the calls were intercepted by Britain's G.C.H.Q at their listening post at Morwenstow, near Bude, in Cornwall. There, close to the endless whitecaps of the Celtic Sea, nearly a dozen dishes pick up signals from commercial satellites such as Inmarsat and INTELSAT. The intercepted phone calls, faxes, Internet, and data transfers are then forwarded to G.C.H.Q's sprawling headquarters in Cheltenham. Once filtered and analyzed, they would be forwarded to NSA over secure, encrypted communications links. 

Other calls to and from bin Laden were picked up thousands of miles to the south of Afghanistan, at a listening post run by Australia's Defense Signals Division located at Geraldton, a scruffy port on the Indian Ocean about 210 miles north of Perth. Situated in the westernmost part of the country, Geraldton was built in 1994 to eavesdrop on commercial satellites over the Indian Ocean.

Eventually, following President Clinton's 1998 American cruise missile attack on bin Laden's camp in Afghanistan, and the realization that his location could be betrayed by signals from the satellite phone, he stopped using the instrument. Now when one calls his number, all they hear is a recording stating he is "not logged on or not in the dialed ocean region." 

Since 1998, bin Laden communicates only through messengers who make calls for him from distant locations. Nevertheless, these are also occasionally intercepted. One such call, picked up by NSA early in September 2001, was from a bin Laden associate to bin Laden's wife in Syria, advising her to return to Afghanistan. At the time, it was filed away when instead it should have been one more clue, one more reason for director Hayden to worry on the morning of September 11. 

About 6:50, as General Hayden was pulling his Volvo into a parking spot near the entrance to OPS 2B, many other NSA employees were arriving at Crypto City. Thousands lived just a few miles away in Laurel, Maryland, long the company town. On September 11, as on most mornings, they slowly snaked their way through the city on US Route 1, passing gritty strip malls selling doughnuts and pizza, and cheap motels with parking lots of aging cars and tractorless cabs. One of those was the Valencia Motel, a tired, eighty-unit structure of brick, Formstone, and tan siding. A garish, mustard-colored sign announced the place to weary travelers. 

In an irony of tragic proportions, as many early morning NSA employees passed the motel, some off to continue their hunt for terrorists, they crossed paths with bin Laden's men as they embarked on the worst attack against America in history. Had an NSA worker looked over at the right time that morning, they might have seen five men emerge from Room 345 and climb into a blue, four-door Toyota Corolla with California tags. They were Hani Hanjour, Majed Moqed, Khalid Almihdhar, Nawaf Alhazmi, and Salem Alhazmi on their way to Washington's Dulles International Airport.  

In the days leading up to the September 11 attacks, a great deal of the planning took place right under NSA's giant ear, in the agency's bedroom community of Laurel. 

Toris Proctor, an unemployed twenty-two-year-old, thought his nextdoor neighbors at the Valencia Motel were gay—and unfriendly. Five men were sharing a room with two double beds, a living room, and kitchenette. "The gay dudes," he called them. "If you say 'Hello,' it's like talking to a brick wall." They had checked in at the beginning of September and used a credit card to pay the $308 for a one-week stay. "We saw them every day," said Charmain Mungo, another resident. "They were always in and out. If one left, they all left." 

Another resident, Gail North, who also worked at the motel as a housekeeper, said the men forbade her from entering the room to change the towels. Instead, they opened the door a crack, passed the dirty items through, and took clean bathroom supplies in exchange. "We saw them every day," she said, "but they wouldn't talk to anybody. We live like one big family here. Even though it is a motel, some of us have been here for over a year. It's like a neighborhood." The men kept to themselves as they walked across the street for pizza or brought a load of dirty clothes to the Sunshine Laundry. "He used the dryer in the back," said Robert Currence, the night manager. "It was weird. He would look at you without speaking."

During one of his visits to the hijackers in Laurel, Mohamed Atta used a supermarket and a Mail Boxes Etc. store in the town to transfer as much as $10,000—excess funds not spent on the terrorist operations—to the United Arab Emirates. At nearby Freeway Airport in Bowie, Hani Hanjour took flying lessons, going aloft with instructors three times in August. Although he had a pilot's license, he needed to be certified because he wanted to rent a plane. But after supervising Hanjour on a series of oblongs above the airport and Chesapeake Bay, the instructors refused to pass him because of his poor skills.

Seeking to stay fit, the five men bought memberships to Gold's Gym a few miles down the road in Greenbelt beginning September 2. There they joined the 600 to 1,000 other people, likely including NSA employees, who worked out each day. "They blended in pretty well," said Gene LaMott, the president and chief executive of the international fitness chain. According to LaMott, the men were quiet and generally worked out in groups, often on the weight-training and resistance machines.

About a mile north of the Valencia on US Route 1 is another seedy motel the hijackers used, the Pin-Del. On August 27, Ziad Jarrah entered the motel office. Scattered on a table near the desk were an assortment of Jehovah's Witness publications with such titles as "Is there really a devil?" and "When someone you love dies." He paid $132 with a Visa card for a three-night stay but checked out at 6:20 P.M. the next night and received a $44 refund. Less than a week later, on September 1, another suspected hijacker, Nawaf Alhazmi, paid $42.90 in cash for a one-night stay at the Pin-Del. 

The planning completed, the leftover money returned to associates in the Middle East, and their muscles toned up, Hani Hanjour and his four associates were ready to begin. About the same time that General Hayden was starting his morning round of briefings, the hijackers were arriving at Washington's Dulles International Airport. In their pockets were one-way tickets on American Airlines Flight 77 to Los Angeles. At the ticket counter, an agent thought it a bit odd that two of the men, brothers Nawaf and Salem Alhazmi, were holding first-class tickets— $2,400 each—but were waiting in the coach line. "Oil money," he thought. 

At Newark airport, Ziad Jarrah joined associates at the boarding gate for United Airlines Flight 93 bound for San Francisco. Still other members of the cells, including Mohamed Atta, were arriving for flights in Boston. 

"Good morning," said the captain to the air traffic controllers disappearing quickly below. "American eleven heavy with you passing through, ah, two thousand for three thousand." At 7:59 on September 11, American Airlines Flight 11 lifted off from Boston's Logan International Airport, knifing through the sparkling clear morning air at race car speed as it climbed from two to three thousand feet. Window seat passengers could clearly see the glint of sunlight reflecting off the gold dome of the State House high atop Beacon Hill. "Good morning," replied a controller at Boston departure radar. "Traffic ten o'clock, two miles, maneuvering." 

It was early September and a good time to be traveling. The weather had broken and it was clear and cooler in the Northeast. The thunderstorms of summer were past, as was the hectic Labor Day holiday. And the eleventh was a Tuesday, statistically one of the least busy travel days of the week. For the eighty-one passengers aboard Flight 11, less than half full, it meant empty middle seats in which to stretch out for the long trip to Los Angeles. Normally capable of carrying up to 269 passengers, the twin-engine Boeing 767—a modern marvel made up of 3.1 million parts—was one of the long-haul workhorses for American Airlines. Sloshing around in the wings and other cavities was up to 23,980 gallons of highly explosive fuel—enough to fill the tanks of 1,200 minivans. 

"We have him in sight," replied the pilot. At fifty-two, John Ogonowski had been flying for half of his life, first in the Air Force at the end of the Vietnam War and beginning in 1979 with American. Earlier that morning he had left the tranquility of his 150-acre farm in the northern Massachusetts town of Dracut. A sweeping expanse of fields and fruit trees, dotted with farm machinery and stone walls, it was where the round-faced Ogonowski, a fourth-generation farmer, found peace. Down from the clouds, he spent his time laboriously plowing and harrowing the soil. "When his hands were dirty and his pants were filthy, he was always pretty happy," said his brother, James.

As the plane passed over the small Massachusetts town of Gardner, about forty-five miles west of Boston, the smell of coffee was starting to drift through the cabin. Flight attendants were just beginning to prepare the breakfasts of omelets, sausages, and fruit cups. Seated in business class, in seat 8D, Mohamed Atta, a clean-shaven thirty-three-year-old Egyptian in casual clothes, did not bother lowering his food tray. He had already eaten his last meal. Instead, he pulled his small black shoulder bag from under the seat in front of him, withdrew a plastic knife and a box cutter, and stepped into the aisle. At that same moment, as if choreographed, four other men assigned to Row 8 also rose and headed toward the front of the plane.

John Ogonowski again heard the crackle of a traffic controller in his earphones. Sitting in front of a twenty-seven-inch, high-resolution Sony TV console, the controller could see Flight 11 's key information— its altitude, direction, and identifying number. "AAL eleven, your traffic is at, uh, two o'clock, twenty miles southwest bound, MD eighty," he said, alerting Ogonowski to a McDonald Douglas MD-80 nearby. 

"AAL eleven, roger," said the captain, adding, "Twenty right, AAL eleven." 

At that very moment, 8:13 A.M., the move was on. Atta and his men quickly grabbed a flight attendant, likely put the cool gray edge of a box cutter to her throat, and forced her to admit them to the cockpit. "Don't do anything foolish," one of the men yelled in English. "You're not going to get hurt." But, likely within minutes, the two pilots were killed and Atta took over the left seat. 

Sixteen seconds later, unaware of the horror then taking place in the blood-splattered cockpit, the Boston controller again radioed Flight 11. "AAL eleven. Now climb maintain FL three fifty," he said, giving the pilot permission to climb from 29,000 to 35,000 feet. Hearing nothing, he  repeated the message ten seconds later, again eleven seconds later, and once more fifteen seconds later at 8:14:23, but still with no reply. Then, suddenly, in an electronic blink, the critical information on Flight 11 disappeared from his screen, indicating that the plane's transponder had been turned off. 

Two hundred miles to the south, at Washington's Dulles International Airport, American Airlines Flight 77 was preparing for takeoff to Los Angeles. "American seventy-seven, Dulles tower," said the controller at 8:16 A.M. "Runway three zero taxi into position and hold. You'll be holding for landing traffic one left and for spacing wake turbulence spacing behind the DC-ten." Among the sixty-four people on board was Barbara Olson, a cable-TV talk-show regular who turned bashing the Clintons into a professional blood sport. Her husband was Theodore Olson, the Bush administration's solicitor general. Also on board were Hani Hanjour and his four associates. 

As American Airlines Flight 77 nosed into the crystal clear sky, Danielle O'Brien, an air traffic controller in the Dulles tower, passed them on to another controller at a different frequency. "American seventy-seven contact Washington center one two zero point six five," she said. Then she added, "Good luck." Later she thought how odd that was. "I usually say 'good day' as I ask an aircraft to switch to another frequency. Or 'have a nice flight.' But never 'good luck.' " 

By 8:15, the air traffic controller in Boston was becoming greatly concerned. Despite his numerous calls, there was only silence from American Airlines Flight 11. "AAL eleven, if you hear Boston center, ident please or acknowledge," repeated the controller, his voice rising. Then, at 8:24, frightening words poured from his earphones. "We have some planes," said a voice. "Just stay quiet, and you'll be okay. We are returning to the airport." It was a message, likely from Mohamed Atta, intended for his passengers but relayed accidentally to the Boston center. 

"And, uh, who's trying to call me here?" said the controller. "AAL eleven, are you trying to call?" 

Then another troubling message. "Okay. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet." And finally, at a second before 8:34, came one more. "Nobody move please," said the voice, "we are going back to the airport. Don't try to make any stupid moves." Six minutes later, at 8:40, the worried controller notified the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). 

Responsible for defending the country against airborne attack, NORAD had become a Cold War relic. Outdated, unable to think outside the box, it had been transformed into little more than a weed-watching agency for the drug war. Protecting the country from hostile attack were fourteen aged fighters at seven bases, none near Washington, DC., or New York City, long the two prime targets for terrorists. 

The hijack warning was received at NORAD's North East Air Defense Sector in Rome, New York. There, at the Mission Crew Control Desk, men and women in blue uniforms huddled intently over rows of green glowing screens. The transponder on Flight 11, they were told, was no longer working. Also, the Los Angeles—bound plane had suddenly made an unexpected left turn toward New York City. And then there were the frightening transmissions. 

Concern deepened when, just three minutes after the first, another alert of a possible hijacking came in from the FAA, this time for United Flight 175. Like American Airlines Flight 11, United Flight 175 was a Boeing 767 flying from Boston to Los Angeles. Sitting in the pilot's seat was Victor Saracini, a fifty-one-year-old Navy veteran from Pennsylvania who often took his guitar along with him on flights. Saracini had also heard the troubling messages from Flight 11 and notified New York Control in Rokonkoma, New York. "We heard a suspicious transmission on our departure from Boston," said Saracini. "Sounds like someone keyed the mike and said everyone stay in your seats." Now Saracini knew he had his own set of hijackers on board. 

As a result of the two alerts, NORAD's Weapons Desk sent out a scramble order to Otis Air National Guard Base at Falmouth, Massachusetts. There, on a quiet Cape Cod marsh, a flock of seagulls suddenly began flapping toward the sky as a Klaxon let out a series of deafening blasts and red lights began flashing in the corner of the alert barns. Within minutes, two national guardsmen, one a commercial pilot on temporary duty and the other a full-time member of the guard, began racing toward their jets, "hot and cocked" on the tarmac. Crew chiefs quickly pulled protective covers from the two vintage F-15 Eagles, built in 1977. Chocks were yanked from the wheels and the heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles were armed. At 8:52 the F-15s were screaming down the tarmac. 

By then, however, they were already too late for Flight 11. Nevertheless, the fighter pilots still had a chance of catching up to United Flight 175. But distance and time were critical factors. Cape Cod was nearly two hundred miles from downtown Manhattan. Another Air National Guard base with F-16s was located at Atlantic City, New Jersey—and Flight 175 would pass within just four minutes of the base before turning north to New York City. But it did not have interceptors on alert. Time was also a problem. Rather than push their throttles to the max, bringing the fighters to their top speeds in excess of Mach 2, over 1,300 miles per hour, the pilots cruised toward New York at just under the speed of sound, around 700 miles per hour. This was apparently to avoid disturbing anyone below with a sonic boom. 

At 8:41, around the same time that NORAD was receiving hijack alerts concerning the American and United flights out of Boston, another plane with hijackers aboard was roaring full throttle down a runway at Newark International Airport in New Jersey. After a forty-minute delay, United Flight 93 was on its way to San Francisco with a light load of passengers. 

In the cockpit, pilot Jason Dahl, a NASCAR fan from Littleton, Colorado, gently pulled back on his controls to take the jet up to 35,000 feet. As the plane climbed, Mark Bingham, a publicist returning home from a meeting with high-technology clients, could feel the pressure gently pushing him back into his cushy first-class seat. Sharing an armrest with him was another Bay Area resident, Tom Burnett, a healthcare executive. Behind the curtain in business class, Jeremy Glick, a sales manager for an Internet company, was seated in Row 11 and no doubt happy to finally get off the ground. Farther back, in the main cabin, Oracle software manager Todd Beamer was on his way to the company's headquarters in Silicon Valley. 

In Washington at 8:41, during the penultimate moments before the most devastating surprise attack in American history, the country's vast intelligence machine was humming along on autopilot. George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, was enjoying a leisurely breakfast with an old friend in royal splendor at the St. Regis, a hotel built in the style of an Italian Renaissance palace. Surrounded by European antiques and rich damask draperies, he was chatting about families over omelets with David Boren. The former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and now president of the University of Oklahoma, Boren had been Tenet's patron as the former Intelligence Committee staff director rose to the top of the spy world. 

Two hundred miles north, American Airlines Flight 11 was tearing toward New York City. Huddling out of sight, a shaken flight attendant managed to telephone a fellow American Airlines employee at Logan Airport on her cell phone. Near rows 9 and 10, she said in hushed tones, were several Middle Eastern—looking men, armed with knives, who had wounded other passengers and had commandeered the plane. 

In Manhattan, forty-eight-year-old Steve Mclntyre left his Upper West Side home a good half hour earlier than usual and was just arriving at the World Trade Center. The director of regulatory affairs for the American Bureau of Shipping, he had an office on the ninety-first floor of Tower One. For nearly a quarter of a century, since graduating from the University of Michigan's Naval Architecture School, he had worked for the company, which sets standards for maritime safety. 

From his north-facing office, the entire city was laid out below him. Silver towers and glass walls radiated in the sun, and flat, tar-covered rooftops with stubby chimneys stretched to the horizon. The glare was so great that he had to close the blinds before sitting down at his computer. Until 1999, when ABS headquarters relocated to Houston, the company had more than 130 workers in Tower One. Now it had only twenty-two to handle local New York business. About half of them were then at work. 

Nearly one hundred floors below, French filmmakers Jules and Gedeon Naudet were shooting scenes for their documentary about a typical day in the life of a rookie New York fireman. At 8:43, as they were zooming their lenses in on men closing a sewer grate, they heard the sound of a low-flying plane. Curious, they pointed the camera almost straight up just as American Airlines Flight 11 streaked across the lens. It was headed directly toward Tower One of the World Trade Center. 

Steve Mclntyre was plowing through his e-mail when he heard what he thought was the roar of jet engines followed by a shadow crossing the blinds. In a nearby office, Claire Mclntyre, no relation, was also checking her e-mail when she heard the same sound—the blast of a jet engine. Impossible, she thought. Then, to her horror, she looked up to see the wing and tail of a colossal plane coming right at her. "Oh my God, all my people," she thought. Screaming, she bolted from her office and raced into the hall to alert the rest of the staff. "Everyone, get out now," Mclntyre yelled at the top of her voice. At the same moment, Steve Mclntyre also realized it was a plane but had no idea of its size. "Oh, shit," he thought to himself. "Someone's lost control of a private Lear jet." 

Far below on the street, the lens of Naudet's camera caught the fuselage of the massive Boeing 767, converted into a flying bomb, slicing directly into the building. For a fraction of a second, the event seemed almost graceful. The building simply swallowed up the plane, like a bullfrog catching a grasshopper in flight. But in the blink of an eye, when the nearly full fuel tanks were suddenly compressed like crushed soda cans, a massive fireball exploded and it was bedlam in hell. 

The plane entered on the ninety-third floor, just two floors above the heads of Steve and Claire Mclntyre, shaking the entire building as if an earthquake had struck. In the American Bureau of Shipping offices, an interior wall and ceiling collapsed and one employee had to be extricated from his cubicle. People began grabbing fire extinguishers while another person had the presence of mind to soak a fat roll of paper towels. Steve Mclntyre left to check the fire exits. 

Seconds after the blast, at 8:43:57, the cockpit crew aboard U.S. Airways Flight 583 heard Flight 11's eerie final gasp. "I just picked up an ELT on one twenty-one point five," the pilot told New York air traffic control, referring to an emergency locator transmitter and its frequency. "It was brief but it went off." The sound probably came from the black box aboard the doomed American Airlines flight in the second before it vaporized. "We picked up that ELT, too," reported a pilot on Delta Airlines Flight 2433, "but it's very faint." 

Slowly it was beginning to dawn on New York Control just what had taken place. "Anybody know what that smoke is in lower Manhattan?" said another pilot flying over the area. "A lot of smoke in lower Manhattan is coming out of the top of the World Trade Center—a major fire." 

By now it had been eleven minutes since New York Control had heard from United Flight 175, and the controller again tried to regain contact. "UAL one seventy-five," he said, "do you read New York?" But, just as with Flight 11, there was only silence. Growing more and more concerned, he checked that his equipment was working correctly and asked whether other locations may have picked him up. "Do me a favor, see if UAL one seventy-five went back to your frequency," he asked a southern traffic control center. "He's not here," came the response. 

After another minute of agonizing quiet, he expressed his suspicion. "We may have a hijack," he told a colleague. "I can't get hold of UAL one seventy-five at all right now and I don't know where he went to." "UAL one seventy-five, New York," he called again. But by then the hijackers were in full control. Near Albany, they made a U-turn back to the east and were at that moment screaming south toward Manhattan over the Hudson Valley at about 500 miles per hour—more than double the legal airspeed. The hijack pilot probably followed the Hudson River, like a thick line on a map, directly toward his target: Tower Two of the World Trade Center. 

At the time American Airlines Flight 11 hit Tower One, the CNN program Live at Daybreak was carrying a report on a maternity-wear fashion show in New York. Then, at 8:49 anchor Carol Lin broke into a commercial. "This just in," she said. "You are looking at—obviously a very disturbing live shot there—that is the World Trade Center and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center." 

CNN then switched to Sean Murton, the network's vice president of finance, who had observed the crash from the twenty-first floor of 5 Penn Plaza. "I just witnessed a plane that appeared to be cruising at a slightly lower than normal altitude over New York City," he said during a live telephone interview. "And it appears to have crashed into—I don't know which tower it is—but it hit directly in the middle of one of the World Trade Center towers. ... It was a jet, maybe a two-engine jet, maybe a seven thirty-seven, a large passenger commercial jet. It was teetering back and forth, wing tip to wing tip and it looks like it has crashed into probably twenty stories from the top of the World Trade Center." 

Fighting the blinding, choking, oily smoke, black as chimney soot, Steve Mclntyre made his way out to the nearly impassable hallway and began looking for the emergency stairwells. The first one he tried was filled with water and debris. After locating the second emergency exit he found it dark and worse than the first. "Where the hell is the third fire stair?" he cursed. A few seconds later he found it, but in the rubble-filled darkness he slipped on a piece of gypsum board and fell, sliding down to the next landing and then bouncing down to another.

Throughout the building, terrorized occupants were dialing 911 on cell phones and pleading for help from fire rescue, which was sending every piece of emergency equipment in its inventory to the Trade Center. At 8:56 a man from the eighty-seventh floor yelled that his office was on fire and there were four other people with him. 

Picking himself up from his long tumble, Steve Mclntyre knew that he had found the only way out and he headed back up to get the other employees. He noticed that very few people were passing him coming down. Above McIntyre's ninety-first floor, occupying floors 93 to 100, was the giant insurance, consulting, and financial firm, Marsh & McLennan. And above them, from 100 to 105, was Cantor Fitzgerald, a large bond dealer. One of the trade center's oldest tenants, it had gradually taken over five floors as it expanded. Finally, there was Windows on the World, the famous restaurant with its breathtaking views, on the 106th floor. Many of the people on those floors, where the plane hit and above, were trapped and would never get out. 

Christopher Hanley, who worked for a division of Reuters on Sixth Avenue, was among 150 people attending a special breakfast conference at Windows on the World. At 8:57 he called fire rescue to tell them the room was filling with smoke and people could not get down the stairs. About the same time, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee called from the 103rd floor. As people were screaming in the background, he told the operator that he was trapped, could not breathe, and that the smoke was coming through the door. 

Another Cantor Fitzgerald employee unable to make his way out was forty-five-year-old Ian Schneider. The son of a truck driver, balding with a thick, black, barbershop-quartet mustache, he worked as a senior managing director of the firm. Schneider, like many others, took the dangers of working in the high-profile building in stride. He had been there during the earlier bombing in 1993 and had gone back to work the next day. And he would hang pencils from the ceiling to see them sway. Minutes after the plane hit, he called his wife, Cheryl, at home in Short Hills, New Jersey, to say he was leaving the building. But this time it would be different: the stairways were blocked or destroyed. Schneider pulled out his cell phone and called fire rescue to tell them that he and many other people were trapped on the 105th floor and that smoke was filling the room. 

Over at Tower Two, many people headed down the emergency stairwells soon after the crash, but after a few minutes, once it was determined that their tower was not affected, they were told that they could return to their offices, which many did. One of those in Tower Two was Sean Rooney, a fifty-year-old vice president for Aon, one of the numerous insurance and financial services firms that populated the twin towers. At the time of the attack on Tower One, his wife, Beverly Eckert, a vice president with General Cologne Re, was attending a conference in her Stamford, Connecticut, offices. Hearing of the explosion at the World Trade Center, she quickly went for her phone where she found a message from Rooney. "It's the other building," he said. "I'm all right. But what I'm seeing is horrible." Relieved, Eckert went back to her meeting. 

When Steve Mclntyre arrived at his office after finding an open emergency stairwell, the other employees were gathered in the reception area. Quickly they began making their way down. Despite the confusion, Claire Mclntyre had managed to grab her pocketbook and flashlight. "The first two flights were dark," she recalled, "with no emergency lights, and water was pouring down the stairs. We could barely see and I put my flashlight on. Then the emergency lights came on, and water was still flowing down." But the slick, oil-covered debris was dangerous and colleague Emma "Georgia" Barnett slipped and fell down three flights of stairs. Nevertheless, she got back up but this time tripped over a hose, injuring her knee. Still, determined to survive, she continued down with the rest. 

The skies had turned deadly. By 8:56 an air traffic controller in Indianapolis was becoming very worried. American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington to Los Angeles, the plane on which Barbara Olson and the hijackers from Laurel, Maryland, were flying, was not answering. "American seventy-seven, Indy," he kept repeating. The controller then called American Airlines operations to see if they could raise the crew. They also had no luck, so the controller asked a different operator to try again. "We, uh, we lost track control of the guy," said the Indianapolis controller. "He's in coast track but we haven't, we don't [know] where his target is and we can't get a hold of him. You guys tried him and no response. We have no radar contact and, uh, no communications with him so if you guys could try again." "We're doing it," said the American Airlines operator. But there would be only silence. 

Among those watching the events unfold on television was John Carr, the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. Shortly before nine his cell phone went off. "Hey, John, are you watching this on TV?" said one of his associates. "Yeah, I am," replied Carr. "That's American eleven," said the friend. Carr nearly dropped his coffee. "My God, what are you talking about?" he said. "That's American eleven that made that hole in the World Trade Center." Carr still could not believe it. "You're kidding me," he said. "No," replied his friend. "And there is another one that just turned south toward New York." Then, referring to United Flight 175, he added ominously, "We lost him, too." 

At 9:02 on the ABC News program Good Morning America, correspondent Don Dahler in New York was giving hosts Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson an update on the Trade Center explosion as the camera focused on the twin towers. "It appears that there is more and more fire and smoke enveloping the very top of the building," he said, "and as fire crews are descending on this area it does not appear that there is any kind of an effort up there yet. Now remember— Oh, my God!" 

At that moment the image of a large commercial jetliner, tilted to one side, zoomed across the television screen and smashed into Tower Two, pushing desks, people, and file cabinets out the windows. Paper began to slowly rain down, sparkling in the sun like confetti. Then, a fraction of a second later, United Flight 175 exploded with the force of a fuel-air bomb, sending superheated flames and dense, black smoke in all directions. 

"My God!" repeated Sawyer, almost in a whisper. "That looks like a second plane," said Gibson flatly and with no emotion, as if describing a passing bus. "I just saw another plane coming in from the side. That was the second explosion—you could see the plane come in, just on the right hand side of the screen. So this looks like it is some kind of concerted effort to attack the World Trade Center that is under way in downtown New York." 

Hearing of the second explosion, Beverly Eckert once more grabbed the phone to call her husband, Sean Rooney. Again, another message was waiting—but it had come in prior to the most recent event. "Just letting you know I'll be here for a while," he said. "They've secured the building." After trying unsuccessfully to call him, she rushed home to Glenbrook. The two had been married for twenty-one years and had known each other since meeting in their native Buffalo in 1967. For Rooney, it was a long commute to the World Trade Center every day, but he greatly enjoyed playing carpenter, plumber, electrician, and mason at his home in Connecticut. Since buying the house fourteen years earlier, he had added cement steps by the front door, built a fireplace mantel in the living room, and laid marble floors in the master bathroom. He even cultivated an herb garden. Eckert especially liked the way her husband laughed—and how it made his shoulders shake. But now she was very worried. 

Soon after she reached their house, only about a mile away, the phone rang. It was Rooney telling her that he was trapped on the 105th floor of the burning Tower Two. He had tried to make it down the emergency stairwell, he said, but around the seventy-sixth floor the heat and smoke had become too intense, driving him back. Then he tried to escape to the observation deck just above his office, but the thick steel door was locked. He said he was now on the north side of the building, and Eckert said she would pass the information on to the rescue workers. Confused as to what was happening around him, Rooney asked his wife what she could see on the television. Eckert said there was fire on his side of the building, but it was many floors below. "The smoke is heavy," Rooney said. "I don't understand why the fire suppression isn't working." 

"Maybe they can get a helicopter to you," said Eckert, desperately trying to get her husband to the roof and possible rescue. "Please try the door again. Pound on it. Maybe someone is on the other side and will hear you. Who is with you?" she asked. "I'm alone," said Rooney. "Some other people are in a conference room nearby." He then went back to the observation deck to try the door again. 

The man charged with protecting the continental United States from a surprise attack was NORAD Major General Larry K. Arnold. Yet he himself was among the most surprised by the attack. He watched the deadly assaults unfold on his office television set. Then when United Flight 175 hit Tower Two, Arnold blinked. "I couldn't believe that that was actually happening," he said. NORAD's public relations officer was talking to his brother in Tower Two when the United 767 hit it. "Well, I better get out of here," the brother said quickly and then hung up. But he never made it out. 

At the time of the impact, NORAD's two fighters from Otis Air National Guard Base were still seventy-one miles away—seven minutes' flying time. 

Over in Tower One, Steve Mclntyre and his fellow employees were still attempting to make their way down the crowded and rubble-strewn stairs. "We stopped at around the eighty-fifth floor to take stock and to calm each other," Mclntyre recalled. "That was much better. We realized the fire was above us and that it was clear below. We just had to get down." His emotional state was "up and down like a yo-yo," he said. "We were completely encased in tunnels. And then we would open a door onto a floor and there would be guys fighting a fire, and then we would open another door and there would be people just milling around." As people or debris blocked their paths, they would zigzag across floors to other emergency stairwells. By the time they reached the sixties, Claire Mclntyre was exhausted. "I was thinking: 'How much more to go?'" she said. 

By now it was about three minutes past nine. Both towers of the World Trade Center had been hit by large commercial airliners with thousands of people feared dead. One crash took place on live television. Another commercial jet bound for Los Angeles—American Airlines Flight 77— was missing and may have been headed for still another target. Other flying bombs were possibly orbiting. NORAD had launched fighters to intercept and possibly shoot down one of the aircraft, requiring the president's permission. Frightened Americans across the country were transfixed in front of their televisions. Commentators were declaring that the United States was under massive airborne attack. Yet as America was suffering its worse assault in history, the president of the United States remained largely in the dark, knowing far less then the average couch potato watching Diane Sawyer. 

At the time, George W Bush was sitting on a stool in Sarasota, Florida, listening to a small class of second graders read him a story about a girl's pet goat. It was the day's routine photo-op, prepackaged propaganda for the press designed to demonstrate his concern for education. Just before entering the class, Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, informed the president of the devastating jet plane crash into Tower One. Nevertheless, Bush decided stay on message and go forward with the publicity event. Florida, after all, had been the most crucial battleground of the last election, and could be in the next. 

About 9:06, four minutes after the attack on Tower Two, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card leaned over and whispered the brief message in the president's right ear. "A second plane has hit the World Trade Center," he said. "America is under attack." Almost immediately an expression of befuddlement passed across the president's face. 

Then, having just been told that the country was under attack, the commander in chief appeared uninterested in further details. He never asked if there had been any additional threats, where the attacks were coming from, how to best protect the country from further attacks, or what was the current status of NORAD or the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Nor did he call for an immediate return to Washington. Instead, in the middle of a modern-day Pearl Harbor, he simply turned back to the matter at hand: the day's photo op. Precious minutes were ticking by, and many more lives were still at risk. "Really good readers, whew!" he told the class as the electronic flashes once again began to blink and the video cameras rolled. "These must be sixth graders!" 

As President Bush continued with his reading lesson, life within the burning towers of the World Trade Center was becoming ever more desperate. At 9:06 the police helicopter radioed the message, "Unable to land on roof." As it pulled away from Tower One, the hundreds or thousands still trapped on the upper floors saw their last hope disappear. Without someone to break open the locked doors to the roof, or pluck them from it, all they could do was hang out of windows trying to find some smoke-free air to breathe. Some flapped draperies to try to attract attention. The towers had now become sky-high chimneys. 

Within minutes, people began jumping, preferring a quick death to burning alive or suffocating. "People falling out of building," said the pilot of the chopper. "Jumper," he added. And they just kept coming. "Several jumpers from the window [Windows on the World] at One World Trade Center." By 9:09 people were also beginning to throw themselves out of Tower Two. "People are jumping out the side of a large hole," said a caller to fire rescue. "Possibly no one catching them." 

Like people trapped on a sinking ship seeking the highest point above the water, those in the twin towers, blocked from going down, were climbing up as high as they could go. But it would be a climb to nowhere. "One hundred twenty people trapped on the 106th floor," exclaimed a caller in Windows on the World at 9:19. "A lot of smoke. . . .Can't go down the stairs!" "Evacuation to the top floor of World Trade Center," said another caller a few seconds later. The problem was the same at Tower Two. "Hundred and fifth floor," a caller yelled. "People trapped! Open roof to gain access!" But, ironically, although some would make it to the roof through open doors, other doors were locked to keep potential jumpers, and simple spectators, off.

For more than half an hour, air traffic controllers in both Washington and Indianapolis had been searching madly for American Airlines Flight 77, which had taken off from Dulles Airport about 8:10. At 8:56 all contact was lost. "You guys never been able to raise him at all?" asked a radar operator at Indianapolis Control. "No," said the air traffic controller. "We called the company. They can't even get ahold of him so there's no, no, uh, no radio communications and no radar." Finally, at 9:24, the FAA alerted officials at NORAD, who immediately sent out a scramble order to their Air National Guard unit at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia. 

Four minutes later, Dulles tower air traffic control operator Danielle O'Brien spotted an unidentified blip on her radar screen. Although she didn't know it at the time, it was the missing Flight 77. Seventy minutes earlier she had bid farewell to the flight crew with her uncustomary "good luck." The alarmed controllers quickly called to warn their colleagues at Reagan National Airport, which was located close to downtown Washington. "Fast moving primary target," they said, indicating that a plane without a transponder was heading their way. 

At the time, the plane was about twelve to fourteen miles southwest of Dulles and moving at lightning speed. Tom Howell, the controller next to O'Brien, glanced over at her screen and his eyes grew wide. "Oh my God!" he yelled. "It looks like he's headed to the White House! We've got a target headed right for the White Housel" At full throttle, American Airlines Flight 77 was traveling at about 500 miles per hour directly toward P-56, the prohibited air space surrounding the White House and the Capitol. Because of its speed and the way it maneuvered and turned, everyone in the radar room of Dulles Airport's tower assumed it was a military jet. 

Among the passengers on Flight 77 were the hijackers from the Valencia Motel and Barbara Olson. Originally, Barbara Olson had planned to fly to Los Angeles on Monday, September 10. But because her husband's birthday was on the 11th, she decided to leave the next morning so she could spend a little time with him on that day. After saying good-bye early in the morning, she called him at the Justice Department about 7:40, just before boarding her plane. 

About an hour and a half later, Olson heard about the hijackings and quickly turned on his office television, worried that one of the planes might be Barbara's. But after a brief mental calculation, he figured her plane could not have gotten to New York that quickly. 

Suddenly a secretary rushed in. "Barbara is on the phone," she said. Olson jumped for the receiver. "Our plane has been hijacked!" she said quickly, but then the phone went dead. Olson immediately called the command center at Justice and alerted them that there was yet another hijacked plane—and that his wife was on it. He also said she was able to communicate, even though her first call had been cut off. 

Minutes later Barbara called back. Speaking very quietly, she said the hijackers did not know she was making this call. All the passengers, she said, had been herded to the back by men who had used knives and box cutters to hijack the plane. The pilot had announced that the plane had been hijacked shortly after takeoff. 

Ted Olson then told her about the two other planes that had flown into the World Trade Center. "I think she must have been partially in shock from the fact that she was on a hijacked plane," Olson recalled. "She absorbed the information." 

"What shall I tell the pilot? What can I tell the pilot to do?" Barbara said, trying to remain calm. Olson asked if she could tell where the plane was. She said she could see houses and, after asking someone, said she thought the plane was heading northeast. 

They then reassured each other that at least the plane was still up in the air, still flying. "It's going to come out okay," Olson told his wife, who agreed. But Ted Olson knew the situation was anything but all right. "I was pretty sure everything was not going to be okay," he recalled. "I, by this time, had made the calculation that these were suicidal persons, bent on destroying as much of America as they could." "I love you," Barbara said as they expressed their feelings for each other. Then the phone suddenly went dead again. While waiting for her to call back, Olson remained glued to the television. It was now about 9:30. 

At that same moment, NORAD's three F-16s, each loaded with six missiles, were wheels up from Langley Air Force Base. It was the closest alert base to Washington, only 130 miles away. The pilots' job was somehow to find Flight 77 before it found its target and possibly shoot it down. But that would require the authorization of the president. 

At 9:30, nearly half an hour after being told that the country was under attack, President Bush was still at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School, far from the madness in New York. Having finished his photo op with the second graders and been given a quick update on the state of the crisis, he strolled into the school's library. He had originally planned to give a speech promoting his education policies. Instead, still seemingly unaware of the magnitude of what was taking place, he told the children and teachers that he would have to leave. "I, unfortunately, will be going back to Washington," he said, because the country had suffered "an apparent terrorist attack." 

With one brief exception, that was the last anyone would see of either the president or vice president until long after the crisis ended. Air Force One was not going to Washington. The commander in chief was headed for the safety of a bunker deep under Nebraska. At first, an administration spokesman said flying to Omaha was a result of a threat against Air Force One called into the White House. But later the administration was forced to admit that such an event never took place. 

Within the tower at Dulles Airport, the tension was almost visible. The supervisor in the radar room began a countdown as the unknown plane got closer and closer to the White House. "He's twelve miles west," he said. "He's moving very fast eastbound. Okay, guys, where is he now? .. . Eleven miles west, ten miles west, nine miles west." About that point, the supervisor picked up the phone to the Secret Service office at the White House. "We have an unidentified, very fast-moving aircraft inbound toward your vicinity," he said. "Eight miles west. Seven miles west." 

At the White House, Secret Service officers quickly rushed into Vice President Dick Cheney's office. "We have to move," said one agent. "We're moving now, sir; we're moving." Once out, they hustled him down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a special bombproof bunker under the East Wing of the building. The rest of the White House staff were told to get out and away from the building as quickly as possible. "All the way to H Street, please," one uniformed Secret Service officer yelled. 

"Six miles," said the supervisor. "Five miles, four miles." He was just about to say three miles when the plane suddenly turned away. "In the room, it was almost a sense of relief," recalled traffic controller Danielle O'Brien. "This must be a fighter. This must be one of our guys sent in, scrambled to patrol our capital and to protect our president, and we sat back in our chairs and breathed for just a second. In the meantime, all the rest of the planes are still flying and we're taking care of everything else." 

But then the plane suddenly turned back, completing a 360-degree loop. "He's turning back in!" O'Brien yelled. "He's turning back eastbound!" O'Brien's fellow traffic controller, Tom Howell began to yell to the supervisor. "Oh my God, John, he's coming back!" 

"We lost radar contact with that aircraft," recalled O'Brien. "And we waited. And we waited. And your heart is just beating out of your chest, waiting to hear what's happened." 

At that same moment, Catholic priest Father Stephen McGraw was in traffic so heavy it was almost at a standstill. He was on his way to a graveside service at Arlington National Cemetery but had mistakenly taken the Pentagon exit onto Washington Boulevard. Suddenly McGraw felt the teeth-rattling roar of a large aircraft only about twenty feet above. He looked out just as the plane clipped an overhead sign and then toppled a lamppost, injuring a taxi driver a few feet away. "It looked like a plane coming in for a landing," he said. "I mean, in the sense that it was controlled and sort of straight." A second later, at 9:37, American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the gray concrete wall of the Pentagon, hitting with such force that it penetrated four of the five concentric rings of corridors and offices surrounding the center court, long nicknamed Ground Zero. 

"I saw it crash into the building," said McGraw. "There was an explosion and a loud noise, and I felt the impact. I remember seeing a fireball come out of two windows [of the Pentagon]. I saw an explosion of fire billowing through those two windows. I remember hearing a gasp or scream from one of the other cars near me. Almost a collective gasp it seemed." 

Nearby in another car was Aydan Kizildrgli, a student from Turkey who was just learning English. "Did you see that?" he shouted to the next car. Traffic along the highway came immediately to a halt as people jumped out of their cars and began putting their cell phones to their ears. Stunned and dazed, Kizildrgli left his car on the road and began walking aimlessly for half an hour. 

Minutes later, in the Dulles Airport tower, the words of an air traffic controller at Reagan National Airport came over the loudspeaker. "Dulles, hold all of our inbound traffic," said the voice. "The Pentagon's been hit." "I remember some folks gasping," recalled O'Brien. "I think I remember a couple of expletives." "It's just like a big pit in your stomach because you weren't able to do anything about it to stop it," said Tom Howell. "That's what I think hurt the most." 

Twelve minutes after the crash, the three Air National Guard F-16s from Langley finally arrived. Too late to save the Pentagon, they were ordered to patrol the airspace over the White House. "A person came on the radio," said National Guard Major General Mike J. Haugen, "and identified himself as being with the Secret Service, and he said, 'I want you to protect the White House at all costs.' " 

At the Justice Department, Ted Olson heard on television that an explosion had taken place at the Pentagon. Although no one identified the aircraft involved, he knew it was Flight 77 carrying his wife. "I did and I didn't want to," he recalled, "but I knew." Late that night, when he finally got to bed around 1 A.M., Olson found a note under his pillow that Barbara had left for his birthday. "I love you," she had written. "When you read this, I will be thinking of you and will be back on Friday." 

* * * 

As rescue workers began racing to the Pentagon, it was quickly becoming clear to air traffic controllers in Cleveland that yet another passenger jet—a fourth—was in the process of being hijacked. This time it was United Flight 93, which had taken off at 8:42 that morning from Newark International Airport en route to San Francisco. Shortly after nine, following the attacks on the World Trade Center, pilot Jason Dahl had heard a brief ping on his company computer. It was an electronic alert notifying him of a message from United's operations center near Chicago. In green letters on a black background came a warning to be careful of someone trying to break into the flight deck. Beware, cockpit intrusion, it said. Confirmed, typed one of the pilots, acknowledging the message. 

At about 9:28, as the plane was flying near downtown Cleveland, Captain Dahl radioed Cleveland Control a cheerful greeting. "Good morning, Cleveland. United ninety-three with you at three-five-zero [35,000 feet]. Intermittent light chop." 

But back in the main cabin there was pandemonium. Three men who had tied red bandannas around their heads were taking over and herding the passengers to the back of the plane, near the galley. One of those passengers, Tom Burnett, managed to pick up a phone without being noticed. He quickly called his wife, Deena, in San Ramon, California, where she was preparing breakfast for the couple's three young daughters. "We're being hijacked!" he said. "They've knifed a guy, and there's a bomb on board! Call the authorities, Deena!" 

Seconds later, the Cleveland controller heard the frightening sound of screaming in the cockpit. "Somebody call Cleveland?" he asked. There was no answer, just the muffled sounds of a struggle, followed by silence for about forty seconds. Then the Cleveland controller heard more struggling followed by someone frantically shouting, "Get out of here! Get out of here!" Finally, the microphone once again went dead. 

Unsure of what he had actually heard, the controller called another nearby United flight to see if they might have picked up the broadcast. "United fifteen twenty-three," he said, "did you hear your company, did you hear some interference on the frequency here a couple of minutes ago—screaming?" "Yes, I did," said a crew member of the United flight. "And we couldn't tell what it was either." The pilot of a small executive jet had also heard the commotion. "We did hear that yelling, too," he told the Cleveland controller. 

"Any airline pilot with any experience, and I've had quite a bit," said veteran commercial pilot John Nance, "who sits up there strapped into a seat knows what happened here: two of my brethren being slashed to death. In the cockpit, I think what happened is the pilots had been subdued. I think their necks had been slashed. And they're strapped in, they've got no way of defending themselves. You can't turn around and fight. They're just sitting ducks." 

Suddenly the microphone aboard United Flight 93 came to life again, but this time with a foreign-sounding voice. "Ladies and gentlemen, here it's the captain. Please sit down. Keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb aboard." Startled, the Cleveland controller called back. "Say again slowly," he said. But silence returned to Flight 93. In New York, the twin towers had become twin infernos. Nearly ten million square feet of vertical space was converted into burning torches.

Completed in 1974, the nearly 1,300-foot towers had become modern day temples of wealth and commerce. Unencumbered by interior columns or load-bearing walls, they were tubes of metal and glass containing 200,000 tons of steel, 425,000 cubic yards of concrete, and 600,000 square feet of glass in 43,000 windows. The wide, file cabinet and desk-clogged floors on which the pools of jet fuel were burning were designed to hold tremendous weights. Made of reinforced concrete pads on metal decks supported by cross beams, each floor covered about an acre and weighed nearly 4.8 million pounds. Much of this weight was transferred to a series of exterior columns by a complex network of beams and slabs connecting to and spanning the distance between the columns. 

But it was also made of flesh. Like an upright city, the towers housed 55,000 workers. On a typical day the buildings had about 90,000 visitors. The complex had its own subway station, and in place of taxis, nearly a hundred elevators whisked people from the seven-story entrance to the 107 floors of offices. Some people there made millions and had endless, heart-thumping views, while others hustled, toiled, and scraped by, never seeing much more than blank walls. 

As in life, economic stratification is also often present in death. Those in the higher, more expensive offices stood less of a chance of surviving. With a stairwell in all four corners, the towers were designed to be evacuated in an hour. Although theoretically designed to sustain a hit from a Boeing 707, it is clear that the architects never anticipated that the towers would survive an attack by fuel-laden, wide-body jets. Those in the area of the direct hits and above were trapped, prevented from going down by the damage to the stairwells caused by the exploding fuselage and the fuel-filled wings. They could only go up, but that was where the searing heat and smoke were accumulating. Below the impact zone, the fuel not expended in the original explosion poured down on lower floors like flaming waterfalls. 

The World Trade Center had become a place were life or death would be decided not by the laws of man but by the laws of physics, where massive steel columns would turn to liquid and solid blocks of reinforced concrete instantly revert to dust. 

At 9:24, fire rescue received a call from a frightened man who said that the stairway had collapsed on the 105th floor of Tower Two. It would be an omen. About 9:30, aboard United Flight 93, Tom Burnett again picked up his phone and called his wife. At that moment Deena was passing his message on to the FBI, but when she heard the call-waiting click, she switched to the other line. "They're in the cockpit now," said Burnett. Then, as the hijackers began vectoring toward Washington, he noticed the plane shifting course. "We're turning back to New York," he said. "No, we're heading south." Deena then connected him to the FBI on the other line. 

Others also began calling loved ones. Back in the coach galley, flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw called her husband, Phil, in Greensboro, North Carolina. "Have you heard?" she said. "We've been hijacked." Passenger Jeremy Glick called his wife, Lyz, and she told him of the hijacked planes that hit the World Trade Center. "Is that where we're going, too?" he wondered out loud. But Lyz doubted it. There was nothing left to destroy. Then she questioned him about whether the hijackers were using machine guns. "No machine guns, just knives," he said. 

Todd Beamer managed to get through to an Airfone operator at the GTE Customer Center in Oakbrook, Illinois, and he described the tense situation. Hearing about the hijacking, the operator switched him to her supervisor, Lisa Jefferson. "He told me that there were three people taking over the flight," she said. "Two of them have knives and they locked themselves in the cockpit. One had a bomb strapped around his waist with a red belt. He [Beamer] was sitting in the back of the plane, and he could see in the front of the plane there were two people down on the floor. He couldn't tell whether they were dead or alive." The two were likely the captain and first officer. 

As word spread through the plane of the World Trade Center crashes, a number of the passengers began discussing taking matters into their own hands. One of those was Jeremy Glick, a six-foot one-inch, 220- pound former NCAA judo champion. He told his wife that he and several others were talking about "rushing the hijackers." Among the passengers were a former paratrooper, a brown belt in karate, a rock climber, and a former Scotland Yard prosecutor. One woman, a sky diver, had a note stuck to her refrigerator at home. "Get busy living," it said, "or get busy dying." 

At about 9:45, Tom Burnett again checked in with his wife, Deena. Now she had even worse news. Sobbing, she told him of the plane that had crashed into the Pentagon. "My God!" he said. Deena added, "They seem to be taking planes and driving them into designated landmarks all over the East Coast. It's as if hell has been unleashed." The hijackers had claimed that they had a bomb on board. But Tom Burnett was now skeptical. "I think they're bluffing," he said. "We're going to do something," he said. "I've got to go." 

Using everything they could muster as improvised weapons— plastic knives, broken dishes, boiling water—a number of passengers began rushing the cockpit, where the hijackers had, apparently, barricaded themselves in. With the angry mob on the other side of the door, they may have realized that they had waited too long to take over the plane. As Flight 93 began slowly making its way back toward the East Coast from Cleveland, the passengers had had time to organize. 

In the cockpit there was frantic discussion of how to fight back. One of the hijackers suggested turning off the oxygen—they themselves could breathe through their face masks. As the confusion increased, the plane began to wobble and then lose altitude. 

Soon after, people for miles around could see a cloud of gray smoke rising above the trees and low-rise buildings of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. This cloud, billowing from a fifty-foot crater, was all that remained of United Flight 93. One hundred and ten minutes after taking over American Airlines Flight 11, the terrorist attacks of September 11 at last came to an end amid the red barns, white churches, and copper pastures of rural Somerset County. 

By 9:30, the situation in Tower Two had grown even more critical and the calls to fire rescue more desperate. At 9:36 a woman called from an elevator saying she and others were trapped inside. Another was from a woman named Melissa. The floor was very hot, she said. There were no available doors. She was going to die, she said, but first wanted to call her mother. Still another call transmitted only the sound of people crying. 

The jet fuel had now been burning for more than half an hour, reaching temperatures exceeding the 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit needed to melt steel, the same kind of steel on which the floors sat. 

People were continuing to jump out of windows in even greater numbers—heart-wrenching attempts to shorten their suffering. "People still jumping off the tower," said a fire rescue report at 9:42. "A man waving a jacket," said another, followed a few seconds later by, "Man just jumped." 

Among those who rushed to Tower Two was Captain James Grillo, a veteran of the New York City Fire Department. "It was terror, sheer terror,'" he said. "Bodies were falling out of the sky. They were jumping off the 105th floor, and they were landing all over the street and the sidewalk. I was trying to avoid looking up and watching it. ... It was horrible. I saw dozens of people jumping." 

Many of those jumping off the 105th floor worked for Aon, a worldwide insurance and risk management company. In Gaelic, "aon" means "oneness," and at the time, more than 170 of the company's employees were trapped together—between the fire below and no escape above. At 9:38 Kevin Cosgrove, the company's forty-six-year-old vice president of claims, called fire rescue once again trying to get help. "Can't find staircase to get out!" he said. "People need help on 105th floor!" 

In a nearby office, fellow Aon employee Sean Rooney had just returned from the last of several futile attempts to escape to the floor above. But as before, the door was locked, and there appeared no way out. Now the smoke was becoming heavy and he passed out briefly on the way back. He touched the office window, and the glass was hot. 

Back in his office, Rooney called his wife, Beverly Eckert. She could hear her husband was having tremendous difficulty breathing. "How bad is the smoke?" she asked. "Pretty bad," said Rooney. By now she knew there was little hope left. "Sean," she said with great sadness, "it doesn't seem to me that they are going to be able to get to you in time. I think we need to say good-bye." For the next few minutes, the two talked about their love and the happy years they had spent together. Eckert said she wished she was there with him. Rooney asked her to give his love to everyone. "I love you," he said. 

The time was getting very short. At 9:47, in a nearby office, a woman called fire rescue with an ominous message. The floor underneath her, she said, was beginning to collapse. 

Over the phone, Eckert suddenly heard an enormous explosion followed by a roaring sound. "It sounded like Niagara Falls," she recalled. "I knew without seeing that he was gone." With the phone cradled next to her heart, she walked into another room, and on the television she could see Tower Two collapsing—the first tower to go down. 

"I will always be grateful that I was able to be with him at the end and that we had a chance to say good-bye," Eckert said. "He was so calm. It helped me in those final moments. So many people missed the last phone call. So many are saying, 'If only I had a final chance to say good-bye.'" 

* * * 

It was nearly ten o'clock when the eleven exhausted, blackened, but alive employees of the American Bureau of Shipping at last reached the bottom of Tower One, having started down from the ninety-first floor nearly an hour before. "I was thinking, 'Okay, great, we're safe,'" recalled Steve Mclntyre. "But outside I could see all this falling debris flying around. I thought, 'We've been coming down for an hour, what the hell is this?'" 

Mclntyre was helping a fellow employee named Ruth, who had sprained her ankle. Having made it to the lobby, the two managed to get across the plaza to an exit on the eastern side where there was an escalator up to Church Street. "We're okay," 

Mclntyre said to Ruth. "We get up this escalator and we're okay." "And then there was a big rumble and a huge roar," recalled Mclntyre. "Everybody shouted 'run,' and then a huge wind came through there. I remember distinctly being lifted off my feet and blown down the hall, I don't know how far. Ruth was holding onto me, but we were ripped apart. I had no conception of what was happening. It went through my mind that a bomb had gone off in the subway. Then the plume came through and there was an opaque blackness. It was not an absence of light. It was opaque. My glasses were gone. I put my hand in front of my face and I couldn't see it. "I thought, 'A bomb has gone off and I'm going to die right here of smoke inhalation.' Then I realized that it wasn't smoke, that it was just very heavy air. There was all this stuff on the floor, but it was light stuff. I was coated in it, as if I'd been immersed in a vat of butter. And the exposed skin on my arm was all pocked from tiny glass shards, maybe a hundred of them. We must have been on the very edge of the blast field when Number Two came down." In the darkness, Mclntyre ran into a glass storefront, but eventually he saw a flashlight beam and heard someone yelling, "Come to me." A short time later, Mclntyre again saw daylight and freedom. Less than a half hour later, Tower One also collapsed. 

At 9:55, almost the same moment that Tower Two collapsed, President Bush, his photo op now over, finally departed Sarasota, Florida, aboard Air Force One for the bunker in Nebraska. 

* * * 

In the hours and days following the attacks, NSA quickly began mobilizing nearly every man, woman, and machine to detect any further terrorist activities and to find Osama bin Laden and other members of his organization. Almost immediately after the incidents began, black ninja-suited members of the Emergency Reaction Team, armed with Colt 9 mm submachine guns, took up posts around Crypto City. The number of bomb-sniffing dogs was also increased; the NSA Museum was shut down; and the Executive Protection Unit, the director's bodyguards, beefed up. 

The National Security Operations Center (NSOC), which directs the agency's worldwide eavesdropping activities, was converted into a war room. Superfast CRITIC messages—"critical intelligence" reports of the highest importance—began going out to field stations around the world every time a new piece of the puzzle was discovered, such as the names of the hijackers obtained from the passenger manifest lists. These CRITICs were distributed almost instantly throughout the intelligence community over the agency's on-line National SIGINT File. Whenever a new CRITIC appeared, officials were notified by a flashing message in the top left corner of their computer screen. 

A crisis management team moved into Room 8020, the director's large conference room, an elaborate mini-theater just down the hall from the General Hayden's office. Another group began meeting continuously in the NSOC conference room. Old intercept tapes were pulled out of storage and checked for clues that might have been missed. Every new piece of information was fed into the organization's massive computer database to see if there would be a hit. 

Room 3E132, the Special Support Activity, became a hub of activity. The group provides cryptologic assistance to military commanders around the world. Units known as Cryptologic Service Groups (CSGs) bring NSA in microcosm to the national security community and forces in the field. Soon after the attacks, hundreds of NSA cryptologists supplemented the small CSG assigned to the U.S. Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. Others CSGs were activated and eventually sent to liaise with the units in the Near and Middle East. 

Another group that shifted into high gear was the Special Collection Service, the clandestine joint NSA—CIA organization that covertly travels around the world attempting to tap into difficult communications channels. 

All over the world and in space, listening posts and satellites quickly shifted from their other targets and began concentrating on Afghanistan and the Middle East. 

But despite the valiant human effort and the billions of dollars spent on high-flying hardware and super-complex software, for at least two years before the attacks and (as of this writing) three months after the attacks, NSA had no idea where Osama bin Laden and his key associates were—or even if they were still in Afghanistan. 

As tens of millions of communications continue to be vacuumed up by NSA every hour, the system has become overwhelmed as a result of too few analysts. "U.S. intelligence operates what is probably the largest information processing environment in the world," recalled former NSA director William O. Studeman. "Consider this: Just one intelligence collection system alone can generate a million inputs per half-hour." That enormous volume, according to John Millis, the former staff director of House Select Committee on Intelligence and a former CIA officer, is exactly the problem. "We don't come near to processing, analyzing, and disseminating the intelligence we collect right now," he said. "We're totally out of balance." 

According to NSA's director, Lieutenant General Hayden, the problem is in the numbers. "Forty years ago there were five thousand standalone computers, no fax machines, and not one cellular phone. Today, there are over one hundred eighty million computers—most of them networked. There are roughly fourteen million fax machines and forty million cell phones, and those numbers continue to grow. The telecommunications industry is making a one trillion-dollar investment to encircle the world in millions of miles of high bandwidth fiber-optic cable. They are aggressively investing in the future." Thus, adds Hayden, "Osama bin Laden has at his disposal the wealth of a three trillion dollars-a-year telecommunications industry." At the same time, he said, "the National Security Agency is lagging behind." 

The numbers only get worse. According to a 2001 Congressional report on NSA, the agency is "faced with profound 'needle-in-the haystack' challenges" as a result of "telephone service that has grown by approximately 18 percent annually since 1992," and the explosion in worldwide telephone service to some eighty-two billion minutes by 1997. 

The problem of system overload went from bad to critical in February 2000 when NSA's entire computing system crashed for nearly four days. "NSA headquarters was brain dead," Hayden candidly admitted. "This was really bad." Then, not mincing words, he said, "NSA is in great peril," adding, "We're behind the curve in keeping up with the global telecommunications revolution. In the previous world order, our primary adversary was the Soviet Union. Technologically we had to keep pace with an oligarchic, resource-poor, technologically inferior, over bureaucratized, slow-moving nation-state. Our adversary communications are now based upon the developmental cycle of a global industry that is literally moving at the speed of light . . . cell phones, encryption, fiber-optic communications, digital communications." 

Simply sending e-mail, Hayden discovered, was a major problem. It takes "an act of God," he said, to send an e-mail message to all of the agency's 38,000 employees because of NSA's sixty-eight separate e-mail systems. Nor can the three computers on his desk communicate with one another.

Even if the system could pick up and process all the critical communications, most of it would go unread for days or weeks, if at all, as a result of an enormous lack of specialists in many key languages, including those used in Afghanistan. By September 10, the number of NSA language specialists expert in the Afghan languages—Pashtun and Dari—was almost nonexistent. According to one senior intelligence official, they could be counted on one hand with fingers left over. "There's simply too much out there, and it's too hard to understand," said Hayden. Congressional analysts agreed. "NSA is," said a report issued in 2001, "not well positioned to analyze developments among the assortment of terrorist groups." 

To deal with the growing language problems, Hayden turned to agency veteran Renee Meyer and appointed her the agency's first senior language authority. 

According to Meyer, even though nearly half the world (47 percent) speaks English, there is a growing tendency for people to return to local languages. "Cultural pride has reemerged," said Meyer. "People use their 'own' languages, and there are all kinds of speakers." The number of languages being used around the world, she said, is enormous—over 6,500—many of which are growing. Also, it takes a tremendous amount of time to train language analysts in many of these "low-density" languages, such as those used in Afghanistan. Simply to reach the minimum professional capability—level 3—takes from three to eight years of study. 

By the summer of 2001, the agency had at last put together a language database showing who in the agency speaks what languages and where in the world they are located. By the fall, Meyer said, she hoped to complete a Daily Language Readiness Indices—a daily printout of the constantly changing database that would be placed on the director's desk every morning. Thus, in the event of a crisis, such as the attacks on September 11, the agency could identify and locate immediately everyone who speaks the critical languages of the area. When she was appointed to the new position Director Hayden told her she had until October 15, 2001 to fix the system. The terrorists of September 11, however, did not wait. "The bad guys are everywhere. The bad guys do not always speak English," she said. "We are not always ready for the bad guys." 

Adding to the problems, the agency has become spread far too thinly. Largely as a result of politics, NSA has become burdened with thousands of targets that pose little immediate risk to the nation while drawing critical resources away from those, like bin Laden and Al Qaeda, that are truly dangerous and time sensitive. One of those targets in which far too many resources are spent is China. Since the end of the Cold War, a number of fire-breathing conservatives and China hawks have sought to turn it into a new Soviet Union. Among those is Robert Kagan, a former aide to State Department official Elliot Abrams. "The Chinese leadership views the world today in much the same way Kaiser Wilhelm II did a century ago," Kagan said in an address to the Foreign Relations Committee. Another is Michael Ledeen, a key player in the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. "So long as China remains a ruthless Communist dictatorship," he wrote in the Weekly Standard, "the inevitability of conflict must inform all our thinking and planning."

As a result of this new containment policy, fully endorsed by the Bush administration, millions of dollars and thousands of people are used for such things as daily, Cold War—style eavesdropping patrols throughout the area, such as the one that crash-landed on China's Hainan Island in the spring of 2001. 

Another mission that draws valuable dollars, equipment, and personnel away from critical operations is the use of NSA in the endless drug war. According to NSA officials, the Drug Enforcement Administration is constantly pressuring the agency to provide it with ever-greater assistance and resources. 

Yet even with the continued growth in targets and missions throughout the 1990s, from wars to drugs to terrorists, the agency's budget and personnel ranks were slashed by a third. 

Shortly before he tragically killed himself in the summer of 2000, House Intelligence Committee staff director John Millis was asked about the readiness and capabilities of NSA and the other spy agencies. "I think," he said, "we're in big trouble." 

For half a century, NSA had fought a war against a giant nation with fixed military bases, a sophisticated communications network, a stable chain of command, and a long history from which future intentions could be anticipated. Now that has all changed. Terrorists are stateless and constantly on the move, their organizational structures are always in flux, and the only thing that is predictable is that they will be unpredictable. And when they do communicate, their infrequent messages join with billions of other pieces of communication—e-mail, cell phones, data transfers—zapping around the world at the speed of light in a complex digital web of bits, bytes, and photons. 

To succeed against the targets of the twenty-first century, the agency will have to undergo a metamorphosis, changing both its culture and technology. 

More than eight decades earlier, another metamorphosis took place. Walking into a twenty-five-foot vault in the old Munitions Building, William F. Friedman yanked on a dangling cord attached to an overhead light bulb. Surrounding him was all that remained of what had been America's Black Chamber. Yet with just a few assistants, over the course of the next ten years he transformed the defunct Black Chamber into the Signal Intelligence Service, which succeeded against all odds in breaking the Japanese Purple code. This ended up shortening World War II and thus saving thousands of lives. That kind of heroic breakthrough is the challenge for NSA. But they do not have a decade. 

appendix a
appendix b
appendix c
notes
source
https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/cryptography/Body%20of%20Secrets.pdf