Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (26 page)

By 1965,
Kamiseya had become the largest Navy listening post in the world, with over a
thousand people raking the ether for Soviet and other Communist communications.
Some of the intercept operators went on temporary assignment aboard one of the
many ships sailing in the waters near the target countries. Others would fly
aboard EP-3B ferret aircraft that eavesdropped near the massive Soviet port of
Vladivostok and elsewhere. After their sea and airborne missions, the intercept
operators would return to Kamiseya with 7 ½ -inch magnetic tapes containing
captured signals. Linguists in headsets would then spend hours sifting through
the data, listening for nuggets of useful intelligence to be sent to NSA. The
base had an extensive library, bursting with foreign-language dictionaries,
other books, and magazines. It was also "net control" for the entire
Pacific, receiving direction-finding reports from listening posts stretching
from California to Okinawa. Kamiseya would then triangulate the exact location
of Soviet ships and submarines over millions of square miles of ocean.

Among many
other listening posts set up in Japan was one at Misawa Air Base, 400 miles
north of Tokyo. It had originally been built by the Japanese with the idea of
establishing a northern base from which long-range bombers could be launched
toward Alaska. The facility was eventually used to train Japanese teams to
sabotage Allied aircraft during the final months of the war. But as U.S. forces
closed in on Japan, carrier-based Hell Cats raked Misawa's buildings and
runways for several days. B-29 raids followed, virtually demolishing the base.
Nevertheless, following Japan's surrender the Army Corps of Engineers quickly
moved in and turned the former sabotage base into a major listening post for
eavesdropping on China and western Russia.

Also to
eavesdrop on China, a listening post was built on the Japanese island of
Okinawa, 300 miles east of the Chinese mainland. Constructed near the town of
Sobe, Torii Station was home to intercept operators who were attached to the
51st Special Operations Command. Traffic and cryptanalysts worked nearby at the
Joint Sobe Processing Center. Among the targets was high-level Chinese army and
diplomatic traffic. "Security was hermetic on that post," said David
Parks, an Army intercept operator who was stationed there in the mid-1960s.
"Once you left the building never a word passed between you and your
comrades about anything that may have happened at work. At work everything was
compartmentalized. ... If there was a need for an individual to visit a part of
the building that they were not cleared for then an escort would have to be
arranged."

Nearby was
an expansive antenna farm consisting of three square miles of rhombic antennas,
and up a hill was a giant circular elephant-cage antenna. The eavesdropping was
done at the windowless operations compound where, says Parks, "you would
hear the music played twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to mask any
stray radio signal that might escape." Just inside the entrance and off a
long hallway were the Morse intercept rooms manned by the various services—each
one targeting their Chinese counterpart.

Sitting in
front of a pair of R-390 receivers, the intercept operators would have one
tuned to a target, known as the "control." When the control stopped
to listen for a response, the intercept operator would search for this other
station—called the out-station—with the other receiver. Likewise, each earphone
would be connected to separate receivers. To make life difficult, sometimes
there were as many as ten out-stations.

Some
targets would be assigned, while at other times the intercept operator would
twist knobs searching for new targets. Prize targets included coded Chinese
messages—streams of numbers in groups of four. Once these were located, the
intercept operator would type them out on six-ply carbon paper. A room
supervisor would eavesdrop on the eavesdroppers to make sure they were not just
copying the loud, easy signals, known as ducks. "If the room supervisor
thought you were just padding your time by copying ducks," said Parks,
"he would call you on the intercom and say something like, 'Get off of
that duck, Parks, and back on the knobs.' "

At the
time, the sounds of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, ripping apart Chinese
society, echoed through the listeners' earphones. "It was reflected in the
stuff we copied every day," said one intercept operator. "For
instance, they sent quotations of Chairman Mao back and forth as a kind of
one-upsmanship. They would get on the net and they would all have their
Little
Red Books.
And they would send a page and a paragraph number and a
quote
within that to another operator and then everybody would jump back and say,
Well, here, read this one and I'm a better commie than you are." Like the
Red Guards, the intercept operators had a copy of Mao's
Little Red Book
close
at hand.

"They're
humans too," said the intercept operator, "and that humanness comes
through. You learn these people as you work the job because it is the same
people day in and day out and you learn their quirks and their tempers and
everything about them. You know their 'fist' and the sound of their
transmitter. You can tell if they've changed a tube in that transmitter after a
while.

"They
knew full well that we were copying them," said Parks, "and tried to
throw us off of the scent all the time. They had their bag of tricks and we had
ours. A typical search would have me incrementally turning the knob and
listening to each and every Morse station I came across. The airwaves were full
of signals of all types, voice transmissions, Morse, teletype, beacons, fax
transmitters sending photo images for the newspapers and wire services. There
was indeed a seeming 3-D soundscape to the radio medium. We used such terms as
'up' or 'down' and 'under' in describing where a target might be in relation to
a signal. There were known islands of sound imbedded at fixed points in the
soundscape. It was not unusual for one op to say to another, 'Your out-station
(target) is underneath that RCA teletype at 3.5 megs [megahertz]. I would know
just where he meant."

Among the
most difficult traffic to copy were coded diplomatic communications.
"Diplomatic traffic was the top of the heap," said Parks. "The
analysts wanted that copied as clean as possible; if you couldn't do that, you
were off the job." Parks once intercepted an unknown embassy employee
"who was transmitting, in English, a blow-by-blow description of the
embassy being invaded and the door to his code room being chopped down by a
rioting crowd. Frantic little guy, lost his mind and maybe his life. I've
always wondered what happened to him. I also wonder if the 'riot' had a purpose
other than frustration. On my end I was sweating bullets as there was brass
standing two deep around my intercept position urging me to get it all. Every
page of six-ply that came off my mill was immediately ripped off and handed
around. The embassy op finally went 'nil more heard.' "

Air Force
intercept operators also worked on Okinawa, eavesdropping on Chinese air
communications. One of their most important tasks was to listen closely as
American signals intelligence planes flew eavesdropping missions near the coast
of mainland China, occasionally penetrating the country. Twice daily, missions
would be launched from either Taipei, at the north end of the island, or
Tainan, at the southern end. One of the Mandarin Chinese intercept operators
who followed those flights from Torii Station was Robert Wheatley. "Along
the way, our ground stations would listen in on the Chicom [Chinese Communist]
fighter squadrons as they'd scramble and rise up to meet the recon
planes," he said. "It was almost like a game of cat and mouse to the pilots
involved. When our planes would come over a given fighter squadron's sphere of
coverage, the MiGs would scramble and follow along below until the next
squadron up the coast would scramble and take over the chase. But the ceiling
of the Russian-made MiG 21 was far below that of our reconnaissance planes, and
generally speaking, the MiGs were no real threat to them."

But
occasionally one of the MiGs would get lucky. Wheatley recalls once receiving a
Flash message from a listening post in Taiwan. "It detailed the shootdown
of one of our airborne reconnaissance platforms by a Chinese MiG-21 over the
China mainland," he said. "The MiG pilot had made a 'zoom climb' to
the highest altitude he could make. At the moment he topped out, he released
his air-to-air rockets. The linguist listening in on the fighter pilot reported
what he'd heard him say. Translation: 'Climbing to twenty thousand [meters] . .
. Rockets fired! I fixed his ass! I fixed his ass!' The meaning of that was
dismayingly clear. The 'game' had become deadly serious! The account of what
had happened was instantly passed to us on Okinawa via encrypted Teletype
transmission. We were instructed to listen for any references to the shootdown
by any of the Chinese ground stations that we listened in on."

As word of
the shootdown got around, said Wheatley, "the mood in the radio ops room
took on the air of a funeral. I would liken it to the moment that America
learned of the
Challenger
space shuttle disaster. Some of those on board
that plane were guys with whom we'd attended language school. And all were
fellow airmen—brothers—whether we knew them or not. Were it not for the luck of
the draw, any one of us could have been aboard that flight. Everyone in the
room was stunned, silent, and ashen-faced. We never did find out if there were
any survivors among the crew of the aircraft. I suspect not. But we never heard
any more on the matter, for we did not have the 'need to know.' "

Picking
just the right spot for the secret bases was as much a matter of intuition as
of science. In trying to "locate intercept stations," said former NSA
research chief Dr. Howard Campaigne, "it's well to know which would be the
best places. They were often surprises. Intercept stations were not effective
when they thought they would be, and vice versa." Sometimes the best place
to listen to a target was on the exact opposite point on earth—the antipodal
spot. "One of the things we worked at was antipodal reception," said
Campaigne. "When a radio station sends out waves, the ionosphere keeps
[them] in like a whispering gallery and [they're] concentrated at the antipodes
and we were able to demonstrate such reception. Unfortunately, the earth is so
clustered that the end of every diameter has got water in at least one half of
the places. So there aren't very many places that are any good."

One spot
where "hearability" was near perfect was the rugged, windswept desert
of Eritrea in East Africa. Reputed to be the hottest place on earth, it is a
land of geographic extremes, where gray mountains suddenly rise like fortress
walls from broad rocky grasslands, and oceans of sparsely vegetated lowlands
marry vast seas of sand. On April 30, 1943, in the middle of World War II, U.S.
Army Second Lieutenant Clay Littleton landed there while searching for a good location
for a radio station in North Africa. Tests showed that Eritrea, just north of
the equator and with an altitude of 7,600 feet, was practically an audio
funnel, and an intercept station was quickly set up, as was a large relay
facility. Operational spaces, containing ten-inch-thick bombproof concrete
walls, were built underground, near the capital of Asmara.

In the
early 1960s a conga line of trucks, straining against the heat and blowing
sand, hauled 6,000 tons of heavy steel to the secret base. By then Eritrea had
become federated with Ethiopia. Planned for Kagnew Station, whose name comes
from the Ethiopian word meaning to bring order out of chaos, was a pair of
massive satellite dishes to capture Soviet signals bouncing off the moon, and
others relayed from earth-orbiting satellites. One was to be a dish 85 feet in
diameter and the other was to be possibly the largest movable object ever
built—a massive bowl 150 feet wide sitting on top of a rotating pedestal
capable of tracking the arc of the moon. When built, it would rise from the
desert like a great chalice, an offering to the gods.

A few
years earlier, Kagnew Station had been the scene of perhaps NSA's first and
only strike. Arthur Adolphsen arrived at the listening post straight from
snowbound Germany in January 1957 wearing a hot Ike jacket. A year later he and
the other intercept operators moved into a new operations building. The move,
however, brought with it numerous new regulations and restrictions on personal
activity throughout the base. "The Operations Center . . . went on strike
some time after we moved on the new base [December 1957]," said Adolphsen.
"It lasted for about four days; no one could hear any signals.

"After
three or four days of not much traffic being sent to Washington a planeload of
NSA people showed up and wanted to know what was going on. We had a meeting of
all operations personnel in the gym and they asked us what we wanted, and there
were many that were brave enough to stand up and let them know. It was brought
on by the post command removing stripes and privileges for very minor
infractions. They would not let us have autos and motorbikes, restricted
everyone to base, and so forth. To my knowledge no personnel got punished, but
the entire post command, right down to the chaplain, got replaced."

By 1967
Ethiopia was attempting to turn Eritrea from a largely independent partner in
federation into simply another province, and a rebel movement developed within
Eritrea to fight the Ethiopian government. The tension was felt acutely at NSA,
which feared that an Eritrean coup might jeopardize its listening post. The
agency therefore sought to eavesdrop both on the Ethiopian government and on
the rebels. However, it had long been a rule at NSA that the agency would not
eavesdrop on the host country from within the host country. And because a
number of Ethiopians worked close to some of the operations at Kagnew Station,
it was felt that any attempt to eavesdrop from within would quickly leak out.
In such an event the entire mission could be forced out of the country. So NSA
turned to its British counterpart, the GCHQ, to do the listening.