Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (27 page)

At the
time the closest GCHQ listening post was in the British colony of Aden (now
part of Yemen) across the Red Sea. The British were having problems of their
own. With only a few months to go before they pulled out of the colony, a civil
war had developed over which local political faction would take over control of
the new nation. Ordinarily NSA would have done the eavesdropping from the U.S. embassy
in Aden but it was feared that the U.S. embassy might be forced out, especially
if the new government was Marxist, as it turned out to be. The British,
however, would be allowed to remain, if only to clear up administrative issues.
Thus it was decided to eavesdrop on the Ethiopian government from the British
High Commission office in Aden, which on independence would become an embassy.

After a
crash course at Bletchley Park, three GCHQ intercept operators were sent to
Aden for the operation. The listening post was set up in a secure room in the
building, the operators hidden under the cover of communications specialists,
and the antennas disguised as flagpoles. "The priority tasks from the NSA
were of course the Ethiopian military, from which a coup could be
expected," said Jock Kane, one of the intercept operators. Tensions in
Ethiopia continued to mount and it was finally decided to pull out of the
country entirely. The enormous antennas were dismantled and the intercept
operators sent back to NSA a decade later, in 1977.

The wide
oceans also needed to be covered in order to eavesdrop on Russian ships, and
submarines as they came up briefly to transmit their rapid "burst"
messages. Sitting almost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, between Africa and
Brazil, is a speck of rock named Ascension Island. Formed by successive
volcanic eruptions, the lonely dot rises steeply from the blue-black waves like
a massive aircraft carrier anchored to the seabed. Dense vegetation is
interspersed with harsh fields of volcanic rock that locals call "hell
with the fires turned off." Nevertheless, the British island is ideally
suited to eavesdrop on millions of square miles of ocean. Thus, the Central
Signals Organization, the overseas branch of GCHQ, found it an ideal location
for a major high-frequency and satellite listening post.

In the
northern Pacific, it would have been difficult to find a more isolated spot for
a listening post than Midway Island, a coral atoll about halfway between
California and Japan. Lost in the great ocean, Midway consists of two islands:
Sand Island, which is three miles square and has a landing strip, and Eastern
Island, a speck of sand less than a mile square, where the listening post was
built. "I looked and looked and could only see the white crests of the
waves below us on the Pacific Ocean," said Phillip Yasson, a Navy
intercept operator, of his first flight to the island. "As the plane got
lower and lower in altitude, I had this feeling of landing on the water because
that was the only thing visible." The men assigned to the listening post
were quartered in an old movie theater that had been bombed during World War
II. "You could stand in the middle of the island," said Yasson, "make
a 360-degree turn, and still see the ocean except for where the buildings
blocked the view."

In the
operations building, the intercept operators eavesdropped on Soviet ships and
submarines and attempted to pinpoint them with a high-frequency direction
finder. Midway was too small for a giant elephant-cage antenna, so instead they
used vertical wires. Nevertheless, reception was very good. "Surrounded by
water, it was a good choice," said Yasson. "There were plenty of
signals." During the midnight shift, one of the intercept operators would
divide his time between eavesdropping on the Russians and washing the clothes
for the others on the watch. The principal hobby of the eighteen people on the
island was collecting the colorful glass orbs that occasionally washed
up—floats from old Japanese fishing nets. Swimming was hazardous because of
sharks. For company the intercept operators had gooney birds—lots of gooney
birds. One survey put their numbers at more than two hundred thousand. The
stately black and white birds—black-footed albatrosses— with seven-foot
wingspreads glide gracefully to earth but then frequently have trouble with
their landing gear, tumbling headfirst into the sand.

The vast
Indian Ocean, which stretches from the coastline of East Africa to islands of
East Asia and the shores of Australia, presented a particularly formidable
problem. The solution involved the dislocation of an entire native population,
the taking over of a British colony, and the creation of one of the most
forbidding territories on earth.

In the early 1960s, the British government began taking an unusual
interest in a sparse, remote group of islands located nearly in the center of
the Indian Ocean. Known as the Chagos Archipelago, it was an almost forgotten
dependency of Mauritius, one of Britain's larger island colonies, which lay
1,200 miles to the south. As the Mauritius islanders began to agitate for
independence, Britain inexplicably offered them freedom, plus £3 million, if
they would give up their claim to the scruffy, distant sandbars and atolls of
the Chagos. The Mauritius government accepted. Later, away from the glare of
publicity, London made a brief, quiet announcement. At a time when it was
freeing its distant lands from the bonds of colonialism, Britain was suddenly
creating a new colony. The tiny Chagos Archipelago, a collection of dots lost
in millions of square miles of ocean, would become the British Indian Ocean
Territory, or BIOT.

With the
ink barely dry on the paperwork, Britain turned around and just as quietly
handed the colony over to the United States, gratis, for fifty years. The
purpose was the building of an unidentified "defence installation."
There was no debate in Parliament and virtually no publicity.

Because of
the U.S. government's need for secrecy, between 1965 and 1973 the entire native
population of some 2,000 had to be evicted from the islands, where they and
their relatives had lived quietly for hundreds of years. A visitor in the late
1950s, before the islands became an "American colony," reported,
"There was a chateau . . . whitewashed stores, factories and workshops,
shingled and thatched cottages clustered around the green . . . and parked
motor launches." According to one of the islanders, "We were
assembled in front of the island because the Americans were coming for good. We
didn't want to go. We were born there. So were our fathers and forefathers who
were buried in that land."

Although
the islanders were all British subjects, they were removed bodily and dispersed
once NSA prepared to move in. "They were to be given no protection, and no
assistance, by the Earl, the Crown, or anybody else," wrote one outraged
British writer, Simon Winchester:

Instead
the British Government, obeying with craven servility the wishes of the
Pentagon—by now the formal lessees of the island group—physically removed every
man, woman and child from the islands, and placed them, bewildered and
frightened, on the islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles. British officials
did not consult the islanders. They did not tell them what was happening to
them. They did not tell anyone else what they planned to do. They just went
right ahead and uprooted an entire community, ordered people from their jobs
and their homes, crammed them on to ships, and sailed them away to a new life
in a new and foreign country. They trampled on two centuries of community and
two centuries of history, and dumped the detritus into prison cells and on to
quaysides in Victoria [Seychelles] and Port Louis [Mauritius], and proceeded,
with all the arrogant attitudes that seemed peculiar to this Imperial rump,
promptly to forget all about them.

In the
spring of 1973, a group of NSA officials and fourteen intercept operators and
analysts from the three military cryptologic organizations arrived on the
largest island of the group, Diego Garcia, to begin hearability tests. Named
after the Portuguese sailor who discovered it four hundred years earlier, the
island is a thin, horseshoe-shaped atoll, thirty-seven miles from tip to tip,
that barely rises above the rolling waves. The NSA team, codenamed Jibstay, set
up a series of intercept antennas, including a small elephant cage known as a
"pusher." Also, NSA shipped a portable eavesdropping van to the
island. It was not long before the Soviets began snooping around to see what
NSA was up to. "A Soviet trawler maintained station just off the receiver
site," said Monty Rich, a member of the Jibstay team. "The trawler
was relieved for a short time by a Soviet Navy
Sverdlov-class
cruiser."

Gregor
McAdam was one of the first Navy Seabees on Diego Garcia and helped construct
some of the early buildings. "All we had was seahuts to live in," he
said. "And lots of donkeys, chickens, flies up the ass, and Double Diamond
beer. Once every couple of weeks a shipment of beer would come in, but if you
didn't get right over to the club (a Quonset hut) and snap up some cases,
you're S.O.L. and stuck with the Double Diamond or Pabst Blue Ribbon."
Even in those early days, he said, the Russians took a great interest in the
construction. "We had a radio station that used to play 'Back in the USSR'
for the Russian trawler that was always offshore."

On Diego
Garcia, cryptologic technicians nicknamed "wizards" worked in the
windowless Ocean Surveillance Building located at "C Site." There, as
part of a worldwide Advanced Tactical Ocean Surveillance System, codenamed
Classic Wizard, they served as the Indian Ocean downlink for the highly secret
White Cloud satellite program. This consists of constellations of signals
intelligence satellites that are able to pinpoint and eavesdrop on ships and
submarines across the vast oceans. Others, in the High Frequency Direction
Finding Division, monitored the airwaves for thousands of miles in all
directions for any indications of Soviet sea activity.

One
wizard, who spent two tours on Diego Garcia, was Steven J. Forsberg, a Navy
cryptologic technician. Despite the isolation and remoteness of the base, he
said, the ocean surveillance compound was also closely guarded by a detachment
of U.S. Marines. "On those few occasions when they could stay awake at
night guarding our site," he said, "which had never been, and never
would be, attacked, they often played 'quick draw' with their loaded .45s.
Well, one night some guy accidentally squeezed the trigger while doing
so." To cover himself the Marine reported that the shot came from a
sniper. As a result the Marines went to full alert. "Security was driving
around in a truck with a loudhorn telling people to go inside," he said.
Other Marines "lined up on the roof in full gear and with loaded weapons.
If you came near the barracks, a guy would scream, 'Lock and load!' and you'd
hear all those M-16 bolts slamming. Then they'd yell, 'Turn around and walk
away! Deadly force authorized!' "

So highly
protected is Diego Garcia that even when a small private sailboat, crossing the
Indian Ocean, pulled close to shore asking to re-supply water and do some
emergency repairs, it was ordered to keep away from the island. Eventually the
boat was allowed to remain offshore until daybreak, but a spotlight was
constantly trained on it. Then as soon as the morning came, patrol boats forced
the sailboat back out onto the deep ocean. Under the terms of the 1966
agreement between Britain and the United States, no one without formal orders
to the area was permitted entry to any of the islands.

By 1989
the Naval Security Group had personnel serving at forty-eight listening posts
around the world, with 15 percent conducting operations at sea aboard ninety
ships.

To avoid
the problem of overdependence on British intercepts, which partly led to the
surprise at Suez, NSA began expanding its presence on Cyprus, ideally
positioned in the eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, it began training
its antennas on the Middle East rather than exclusively on the Soviet Bloc. To
the north, east, and west of Nicosia, Cyprus's capital, listening posts were
set up. At Karavas, about fifty Soviet and Slavic linguists eavesdropped on the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Other monitoring stations were set up in Mia
Milea, in Yerolakkos, and near Troodos Mountain. On the south coast, at
Akrotiri, intercept operators listened for indications of war in the Middle
East, while also eavesdropping on peace negotiations. In Nicosia, signals
intelligence personnel were based in the embassy to relay back to NSA
intercepted diplomatic cables. During the 1990 Gulf War, the listening posts
played a key role and also spearheaded the hunt for the hostages in Lebanon.

By far the
most difficult—and at the same time most important— body of water in which to
spy was the Barents Sea. Like an ice pack on Russia's forehead, the
half-million square miles of dark, unforgiving, polar-cold water held some of
Russia's deepest secrets. It was a frozen world of white, gray, and black where
the blunt hulls of onyx-colored submarines began and ended their long patrols
in search of American subs under the Atlantic Ocean. It was also where new
missiles were tested and glacier-shaking nuclear weapons were detonated. The
thin winter ice allowed the Russian Northern Fleet to conduct exercises
year-round, and the sky above was like a mechanical aviary for the Soviet Air
Force. The air was electric with signals. The problem for NSA was how to get an
antenna and tape recorder into one of the most secret and heavily protected
areas on earth.

Black and
moonless, the late night was an odd time to start painting. In the dim reddish
glow from a low-observation flashlight, George A. Cassidy began applying thick
coats of steel-gray paint to the submarine's tall sail. It was mid-September
1965 and the frigid spray from the North Sea deposited a dewlike film on the
sailor's dark pea coat. In an hour the giant "SS-352," identifying
the sub as American, had been painted over on both sides of the tower. The USS
Halfbeak's
covert mission had begun.