Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (100 page)

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 biocomponents 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.

"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
detonated a bomb hidden in their TV camera during an interview with Massoud on
Sunday. . . . Opposition spokesmen have accused the Taliban of being behind the
suicide bombing and hint that Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden may also be
involved. The assassins, they say, are Arabs who had come from the Taliban-controlled
capitol, Kabul."

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 Ayman 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 coconspirator, Abdel 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 GCHQ 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 GCHQ'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 next-door 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.