Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (24 page)

A short
time later, Seigrist spotted the chalky white oval, dotted with small
buildings. In the back of the plane, an adrenaline rush hit Smith and LeSchack.
After once again checking his main and reserve parachutes, Smith went first,
hitting the frigid air as if it were a wall of ice and then almost impaling
himself on one of the tall Russian antennas. Then LeSchack dove in and, after a
sharp tug on his straps, drifted slowly down to a feather landing in the soft
snow.

After a
night of rest on Russian bunks, they began exploring the ghost land. Like
anthropologists discovering a long-lost civilization, they were surprised by
what they saw. "What a horror!" LeSchack exclaimed when he entered
the kitchen. "Food was still on the stove, frozen in greasy skillets.
There was dried blood all over, and animal carcasses, including dog carcasses,
were lying around in an adjacent shed." There were films for
entertainment; the walls were plastered with posters exhorting the polar spies
to work hard for the Communist Party. Over the next few days, the two Americans
conducted a detailed exploration of every part of the floe. Film was found of
North Pole 8's crew; there was a shot of a burly Russian sunbathing on the ice
in his trunks. Personal mementos had been left behind in the scramble to
escape. In one letter, a mother admonished her son to bundle up in plenty of
clothes. Photographs were taken of equipment suspected of being used for
acoustical surveillance and of the antenna field and ionospheric laboratory
that had likely been used for eavesdropping.

On May 31,
a CIA plane with a strange forklike contraption on the nose set out to retrieve
Smith and LeSchack. But the ice floe had been lost. Several days went by, and
more missions, but North Pole 8 had disappeared in a bewildering sea of white.
From the plane, the Arctic Ocean resembled the cracked shell of a hard-boiled
egg, splintered into small fragments. On one of those fragments, the two
Americans continued cataloging items as they waited for their pickup. They had
enough food, and weather conditions were good.

Finally,
on June 2, while he was lugging gear on a toboggan to one of the huts, LeSchack
heard the plane. He instantly began jumping up and down and signaling with his
arms. As the CIA plane flew into position, Smith and LeSchack prepared to be
yanked off the island. Three balloons were inflated, including one for a duffle
bag of Russian papers, film, gear, and other salvaged items. The Intermountain
B-17 made a long, slow pass and snatched up the booty bag with no trouble. Now
it was LeSchack's turn.

Aboard the
plane, pilot Seigrist was struggling to avoid vertigo as white merged with
white. "Instantly upon loss of sight of the buildings," he recalled,
"the horizon definition disappeared into the gray ice crystal-dominated
atmosphere. I was instantly in a
situation that could be imagined as
flying in a void."

Three
hundred feet below, LeSchack was having his own problems. Holding the balloon
like a
child at a fair, he went to a clear spot for pickup. But as he
released the helium-filled bag, it was caught by a sudden updraft. The nylon
line should have gone five hundred feet straight up, but instead strong winds
aloft made it ascend at an angle.
 
LeSchack became almost
weightless. The balloon then began dragging him backward toward a dangerous
ridge. As he bounced against the hard snow, unable to stop himself, LeSchack
tried frantically to grab onto something, anything, to keep himself from being
dragged. His face mask twisted, cutting off his vision. Finally, after endless
seconds, he was able to plow small holes in the ice and snow with his
mitten-covered hands. This gave him just enough traction to slow and then stop.

Unable to
assume the standard sitting position, he just lay motionless on the ice.
Moments later he felt a jerk and was airborne, but this time he was being
lifted by the B-17 and not the wind. The awkward position in which he'd been
picked up caused him difficulties. He was dragged by the plane as if
water-skiing on his belly behind a superfast speedboat. But six and a half
minutes after the Skyhook plucked him off North Pole 8, he was safely pulled
into the tail of the spy plane.

Aware of
LeSchack's difficulties, Smith attempted to hold on to a tractor when he
released his balloon but lost his grip and also became a human sled. For more
than two hundred feet, on his way toward the Arctic Ocean, he bounced and
banged against sharp ice projections until he managed to catch his heel in a
ridge. Seconds later he felt like Peter Pan. "I was flying," he
recalled. The Skyhook raised him as though in an elevator at first and then
slowly turned him horizontal. Minutes later the tail position operator reeled
him in like a prize marlin, his third catch of the day.

Back in
Washington, analysts went over LeSchack and Smith's 300-plus photographs, 83
documents, and 21 pieces of equipment. Much of the gear, they concluded, was
"superior in quality to comparable U.S. equipment." They also found
empty cartons for thousand-foot reels of magnetic tape, the sort used for
recording signals intelligence, but no tapes. And although they found a number
of radio-related items and manuals, they turned up no undersea acoustic
equipment. Whatever had existed was likely dumped off the island. As for the
used magnetic tapes, the Russians probably took them along.

By 1961,
following the enormous financial and intellectual push given the agency during
the last few years of the Eisenhower administration, NSA was slowly beginning
to emerge from its cocoon. Its budget had risen to an impressive $116.2
million, of which $34.9 million was for research and development of new
computers and eavesdropping equipment. More and more the White House, the
Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department were depending on NSA signals
intelligence. Although still unable to penetrate high-level Soviet ciphers, the
agency had broken the cipher systems of more than forty nations, including
Italy, France, the United Arab Republic, Indonesia, Uruguay, and even some
Soviet satellite countries, such as Yugoslavia. Some breaks relied more on
deception than on cryptanalytic skill or brute force. The codes and ciphers of
Turkey, for example, were obtained by bribing a code clerk in Washington.

Around the
world, on land, in the air, at sea, and even in space, NSA was extending its
reach. Throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere, listening posts were growing
like steel weeds to snare every escaping signal from the Communist East and
West. More than 6,000 operators manned over 2,000 intercept positions around
the world.

The polar
regions continued to be prime locations for listening posts. On barren,
ice-locked islands off Alaska, shivering intercept operators kept the NSA's
electronic ear cocked day and night toward the Bering Sea and Siberia's frozen
frontier. "I can't go there, it's too cold," thought Navy intercept
operator Mike Stockmeier when he received his orders to a remote, foreboding
corner of Alaska's Kodiak Island. It was a place known less for humans than for
powerful brown bears, some of which, when about to attack, stood ten feet tall
on their hind legs. Landing at a small airstrip on the island, Stockmeier was
met by a hearty, bearded fellow cryptologist. "He appeared to be straight
off the sled dog track," recalled Stockmeier, "as he quickly helped
us pack our seabags in the carry-all for the three-hour ride." Their
destination, over a narrow, winding road, was Cape Chiniak on the easternmost
point of the island.

By the
mid-1960s, the snug listening post at Cape Chiniak, nestled beneath sheltering,
ice-sculptured peaks, had grown to about sixty men. A dog named Sam in a Navy
sweater "kept us safe from whatever roamed free on Kodiak," said
Stockmeier. From the sea, colliding low-pressure systems often brought howling
sixty-knot gales and pea-soup visibility.

"The
Hole," Stockmeier said, referring to the operations building, "could
be a taxing place to work. From the door combo which sometimes required the
oncoming watch to chip away the ice to find the numbers, to battling the cold
drafts and sometime snow flurries which found their way under the shack and up
through various holes in the deck [floor], people manned their post through all
adversity."

At the
center of the Hole sat the heavy base of the tall intercept and
direction-finding antenna. The device protruded through the roof like a steel
tree, snaring signals from the Soviet Northern Fleet. As it slowly rotated,
reflecting the low Arctic sun, it helped pinpoint the location of warships and
submarines as they transmitted messages to their shore bases. These coordinates
were then transmitted to Net Control in Wahiawa, Hawaii.

The least
desirable chore was destroying the overflowing cans of ashes after the highly
secret intercept reports had been shredded and then burned. "The most
exciting part of burn detail was dumping the ashes," said Stockmeier.
"This meant dumping the ashes in the ocean—not easy to do—or driving down
to Chiniak Creek and probably having to chop a hole in the ice and dumping the
ashes to be washed out to sea."

Among the
harshest assignments was Adak, an unforgiving rock lost in the Bering Sea at
the tail end of the Aleutian chain. One veteran of the listening post, Edward
Bryant Bates, put his memories to rhyme:

Cold and icy blue, as it appeared
from offshore

view

Tundra grass in tufts and bands

Pushing up through snow and hard
coastal sands

Clam Lagoon, where G.I. tents of
olive green

White blanketed by snow kept most
unseen

One small Quonset hut aside; where
secret 'orange'

messages in airspace tried to
hide...

But were intercepted by those
inside

"I
have been told by a native of this forsaken land," Karl Beeman wrote
during his tour, "that the island is gradually making progress in the
general direction of the Arctic Circle due entirely to the unbelievable
strength of the winds." Beeman studied art at Harvard before entering the
Navy and winding up at Adak. On a day off he went for a brief hike toward Mount
Moffett, a towering peak a few miles from the listening post. The morning was
clear and the sun was strong but on a spit of land near the icy sea he became
disoriented and then stranded. Days later rescue workers found his body. Unable
to free himself, trapped in the brutal winds he had earlier written about, he
preferred death, committing suicide with a gun he was carrying.

While some
listening posts were built in icy Arctic wastelands, others sat on mountaintops
or hung precariously on the edge of cliffs. Among the most secret was an
isolated monitoring station on the shores of the Caspian Sea in northern Iran.
Set against a rugged, boulder-strewn background, the snow-white, pockmarked
radomes—ball-shaped radar domes—made the station look like an advanced moon
base. Run by the CIA, it had a unique mission.

Although
the effort to locate Soviet early-warning radars along border areas had been
growing in success, finding radars hidden deep inside the USSR had proved
nearly impossible. But then someone remembered an incident at Cape Canaveral:
during the test launch of a Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile, a signal
from a ground-based radar a thousand miles away had bounced off the IRBM and
reflected down to the Cape. The CIA had used the experience to develop a system
codenamed Melody, which they placed on the banks of the Caspian Sea. The idea
of Melody was to focus Elint antennas on Soviet ballistic missiles during their
test flights and follow their trajectory. The experiment worked beyond
expectations. The intercept antennas were able to pick up signals from Soviet high-powered
radars well over the horizon as they bounced off the missiles. Eventually, over
the years, the Caspian Sea station was able to produce an electronic map of
virtually all the ground-based Soviet missile-tracking radars, including the
antiballistic missile radar systems at a test range a thousand miles away.

But Melody
was not as successful in locating early-warning radars, especially a new
surface-to-air missile system codenamed Tall King. At the time, it was
considered essential to map all the Tall King radars to prevent the shootdown
of American bombers in the event of war. Also, the CIA had a peacetime interest
in knowing the locations of all surface-to-air missile bases. The agency was
then completing work on a super-fast, super-high-flying successor to the U-2,
codenamed Oxcart. (The SR-71 would be a later variant.) Because Soviet
missiles were reaching ever greater heights, and because the Oxcart was
designed to overfly Russia, discovering the precise locations of these
potentially deadly radar systems was vital.

The
solution was to be found on the moon. Scientists determined that Tall King
radar signals, traveling in a straight line, would eventually collide with the
moon at least part of the day. The trick would be to catch the signals as they
bounced back to earth. To accomplish this, a complex "catcher's mitt"
was built. Near Moorestown, New Jersey, a giant sixty-foot satellite dish was
aimed at the lunar surface. Attached to it were very sensitive Elint receivers
tuned to the Tall King frequency. Over time, as the earth and moon revolved and
rotated, all of the Tall King radars eventually came within view and were
charted.