Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (18 page)

In a
matter of days the Navy turned Key West from a sleepy supply depot for
cryptologic equipment to a buzzing city of eavesdroppers. "What had been
sort of a lazy tempo in the Key West theater of operations suddenly heated up
to match the summer weather," recalled Owen Englander, who was in charge
of the Key West naval security detachment. "Almost overnight the National
Command Authority and the Navy and Air Force operational worlds discovered
Naval Security Group Detachment Key West. A decision was made to beef us up and
people commenced to arrive from every direction."

The
intercept operators worked in a World War I bunker buried under fifteen feet of
reinforced concrete and compacted marl—sand, clay, and crushed coral. It was
designed to withstand a direct hit from a 16-inch shell. Sailors immediately
began setting up a huge dish antenna as well as an assortment of wires and
poles. In addition to the planes, bases, and ships eavesdropping on Cuban and
Soviet communications, submarines were sent in. One sub was able to sneak close
enough to eavesdrop on a microwave link on the Isle of Pines. For NSA's
eavesdroppers, submarines provided a quality no other platform could offer:
stealth.

But
although it was NSA's most important target in the summer and fall of 1962,
Cuba was far from the only one.

At
periscope depth, sixty feet under the dark and frigid Barents Sea, the USS
Nautilus
(SSN 571) was barely moving. The world's first nuclear-powered submarine,
it had made headlines four years earlier when it sailed beneath the icepack to
the North Pole and broadcast the message
"Nautilus
90 north."
Now it was on an enormously sensitive espionage mission a short distance off a
black and desolate Soviet island above the Arctic Circle. Without doubt, Novaya
Zemlya was the most forbidding piece of real estate on the planet. One year
earlier, the Russians had exploded the largest bomb in the history of mankind
above the island, a 58-megaton thermonuclear monster. Now the crew of the
Nautilus
was busy making preparations to eavesdrop on and photograph a new round of
tests. Thirteen miles from ground zero, Sigint specialist John Arnold was
attaching the final piece of critical equipment—a cardboard toilet paper tube.

Arnold, a
Navy chief, was a fast riser in a superexclusive club: NSA's small band of
undersea intercept operators. Sealed for months in closet-sized listening posts
aboard specially outfitted submarines, the deep-diving eavesdroppers prowled
close to Soviet coasts, recording shore-based transmitters and key signals
within the Russian fleet. "Collection at thirteen miles was pretty
good," said Arnold. "Sometimes you could even pick up signals with
your antennas underwater. Not much, but some of the radars were strong enough
to penetrate the water." Locating radar installations was a key mission of
the team. "You could tell from the frequency and the pulse repetition rate
and the scan rate what kind of radar it is and take its bearing by direction
finding."

Arnold
began his career in the old diesel-powered boats, which needed to break the
surface about once every twenty-four hours in order to get new air through the
snorkel. "If you had any antennas or masts up, the periscope was always
up—even during the daytime—because a helicopter or aircraft could come cruising
by and they would see your mast," said Arnold. "And if you didn't
have your periscope up keeping a lookout, they could end up detecting
you."

Once, a
conning officer became so mesmerized watching a helicopter he completely forgot
to call an alert. "He just kept focused on it and watched it come right
over us," said Arnold. "So we became the target of an ASW
[antisubmarine warfare] exercise in short order. That kept us down for over two
days before we could shake him and get fresh air again. Everyone that was
nonessential was to stay in their bunks to minimize the consumption of
oxygen."

Arnold had
spent much of the summer of 1962 beneath the waves of the Barents Sea. A few
months earlier, in anticipation of renewed nuclear tests, he had put together a
special piece of equipment and headed for Novaya Zemlya aboard the USS
Scorpion.
But when the tests were postponed, the crew spent the mission conducting
electronic surveillance just off Russia's sensitive Kola Peninsula. "We
almost had an underwater collision with a [Soviet]
November-
class
submarine,"
said Arnold. "We were trailing, collecting data on its bottom side when it
was on the surface. We were smack dab under him. . . . Between the bottom of
his sub and the top of the
Scorpion,
sometimes the periscope was only
six to twelve inches, closely inspecting underwater appendages, protrusions,
and so forth, and recording it on television." Suddenly the depth finder
aboard the Soviet boat sent out a "ping" to determine the distance to
the bottom. "That was standard practice just before they dive," said
Arnold. The
Scorpion
escaped just in time.

Back home
for just a few days, Arnold was again quickly dispatched to Novaya Zemlya when
word was received that Soviet bomb testing would begin soon. This time he was
transferred to the nuclear-powered
Nautilus.
As other Sigint specialists
eavesdropped on Soviet technicians rigging for the test, Arnold was fitting the
sub's periscopes with special photographic equipment. The cameras were
connected to the lens of the scopes with rolls of cardboard toilet paper tubes
double-wrapped with black electric tape. "On one periscope we had an
optical detector that measured light intensity versus time," said Arnold. "On
the other we had a high-speed color movie camera attached."

Suddenly
the dimly lit submarine, deep under the surface of the sea, lit up with a
blinding light. "When the detonation went off it was just like someone had
set off a flashbulb in your face," said Arnold. The light had blasted
through the heavily wrapped toilet paper tubes as if they were made of
see-through plastic. The crew not only saw the flash, they heard and felt the
explosion. "It was a really weird sound when you're in a submarine,"
Arnold recalled. "It sounds like a jet airplane when it breaks the sound
barrier. Then you feel it also. It feels as though you're standing on a steel
deck and somebody under the deck has a sledgehammer and he hits the steel deck
plate right where you're standing—it's a sharp shock. It broke a few
fluorescent light bulbs and caused some insulation to pop off."

Over six
weeks, Arnold witnessed twelve or thirteen tests. "They were from twenty
kilotons up to fifty megatons," Arnold said. After the initial blast, the
explosion could be viewed through the periscope. "They were spectacularly
beautiful to watch," he said. "You could look through the periscope
and watch the mushroom cloud build and the colors develop." Following the
nuclear tests, Arnold, like many other intercept operators, was assigned to a
mission off Cuba, this time aboard a surface ship trying to pick up signals
related to the deadly Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missiles.

About two
o'clock in the morning on September 15, 1962, the crisis again ratcheted up
several levels. After double-checking and triple-checking, there was no
question: the U.S. listeners had detected a Russian "Spoon Rest"
radar, fully active. For the first time, the SA-2 missiles were operational,
capable of shooting down any aircraft on a moment's notice, as had the SA-2 in
Russia that brought down the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers. Listening
posts in Florida, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere helped the
Oxford
pinpoint
the signal as emanating from a location about three miles west of the port of Mariel.
From now on, all U.S. pilots, no matter what aircraft they flew, would have a
cocked gun pointed at them.

The
activation of the SA-2 missiles gave NSA and CIA an opportunity to fake the
Russians into revealing key details of the weapons system. Gene Poteat, a young
CIA scientist, had come up with a scheme to inject false targets into Soviet
radar. Codenamed Palladium, the operation involved sending deceptive signals to
give Russian radar operators the false impression that they were tracking an aircraft.
"By smoothly varying the length of the delay," Poteat wrote later,
"we could simulate the false target's range and speed." As the
Russians tracked the ghost aircraft, NSA intercept operators listened in. Later
analysis would be able to determine such important details as just how
sensitive the radar systems were, and to assess the proficiency of the
operators.

The
Palladium system was mounted on a destroyer operating out of Key West. As the
ship cruised well off the Cuban coast, the Palladium system transmitted false
signals indicating that a U.S. fighter plane out of Florida was about to
penetrate Cuban airspace. At about the same time, an American submarine that
had slipped into Havana Bay released a number of balloons that carried metal
spheres of varying size into the sky.

Elsewhere
on the destroyer, in an NSA van lashed to the deck, intercept operators closely
monitored the Russian radar, hoping to be able to determine just how accurate
the system was by studying the way it tracked the ghost aircraft and the metal
objects. They quickly struck pay dirt. A Cuban fighter suddenly took off after
the ghost aircraft; other MiGs began circling where the submarine had surfaced.
In the NSA van, the intercept operators quickly began eavesdropping on both the
shore-based radar systems and the pilots pursuing the ghost aircraft. "We
had no trouble in manipulating the Palladium system controls," wrote
Poteat, "to keep our ghost aircraft always just ahead of the pursuing Cuban
planes." Through earphones, one intercept operator heard the Cuban pilot
notify his base that he had the intruding plane in sight and was about to shoot
it down. A technician moved his finger to a button. "I nodded yes,"
said Poteat, "and he switched off the Palladium system." The ghost
aircraft disappeared.

Palladium
proved very successful, revealing that the Soviet radar systems were
state-of-the-art and that their operators were equally skilled. "We also
knew which of their radars had low power [or] maintenance problems or were
otherwise not functioning up to par," noted Poteat, "and where the
U.S. Air Force might safely penetrate in wartime."

Five days
before the discovery of the operational SA-2 missiles, Secretary of State Rusk
had become so worried over the prospects of a shootdown over or near Cuba that
he asked for a meeting of the key players in Operation Mongoose. Rusk was
particularly unsettled by several recent incidents. On August 50, a U-2 had
accidentally overflown Russia's Sakhalin Island, generating a harsh Soviet
protest, and a few days later another CIA U-2, based in Taiwan and flown by a
Chinese Nationalist, was lost over mainland China.

At the
meeting, Rusk mentioned the incidents and then looked across the table at CIA
deputy director Pat Carter. "Pat, don't you ever let me up?" he asked
jokingly. "How do you expect me to negotiate on Berlin with all these
incidents?" But Robert Kennedy saw no humor. "What's the matter,
Dean, no guts?" he snapped. Eventually Rusk and Carter compromised on a
reduced flight schedule. But Carter expressed his concern. "I want to put
you people on notice," he said, "that it remains our intention to fly
right up over those SAMs to see what is there." There was no response,
positive or negative. As the meeting broke up and the officials began heading
for the doors, Carter quietly grumbled, "There they all go again and no
decisions."

The next
day, October 10, NSA reported that the Cuban air defense system seemed to be
complete. The Cubans had just begun passing radar tracking from radar stations
to higher headquarters and to defensive fighter bases using Soviet procedures.
Their system, with Russians in advisory positions at every point, was now ready
for business.

From the
very first, NSA had performed superbly in tracking the Cuban arms buildup,
shipload by shipload, pallet by pallet. But without the ability to break
high-level Soviet or Cuban cipher systems, the codebreakers could not answer
the most important question: Were all the weapons being delivered defensive, or
were any offensive, such as ballistic missiles? Even unencrypted Cuban
communications frequently frustrated NSA's abilities. "Communications
security has been very well maintained through a system of cover words and/or
callsigns," one NSA report noted. Instead, NSA depended mostly on
commercial ship transmissions, unencrypted Cuban chatter, and direction
finding. Thus it was neither the NSA nor the CIA that would discover the first
hard evidence of medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) in Cuba. Instead it
was the high-resolution "eyes" of an Air Force U-2. Nevertheless,
Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who would later become Chief of Naval Operations,
told Congress that "electronic intelligence led to the photographic
intelligence that gave indisputable evidence of the Soviet missiles in
Cuba."

On
Thursday, October 18, a U-2's high-altitude reconnaissance photography revealed
that the Soviet and Cuban construction teams were making rapid progress. In
August, only the initial construction of one missile site was observed. But new
photography revealed two confirmed MRBM sites and one probable. Two other
sites, possibly for the more powerful intermediate-range missiles, were also
confirmed.

On the
Oxford,
it was nail-biting time. NSA intercepts picked up frequent Cuban references
to "the
Oxford
spy ship." According to Parish, "They
would send vessels out and get in their path. Some low flyers would come
over—low-flying aircraft. They would come on, circle them with their guns
trained on them."