Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (29 page)

On
Saturday morning, August 12, the
Kursk,
with 118 crewmembers aboard, was
off the Kola Peninsula cruising at periscope depth, about sixty feet below the
sea's heaving swells. Some distance away, maintaining radio silence, the USS
Memphis
eavesdropped on the maneuvers. Sticking above the surface like the necks of
tall, gray giraffes were antenna-covered masts. Down below, intercept operators
searched through the static for fire control signals and pilot chatter while
sonar men plotted the pinging sounds of other steel fish. Then at precisely
11:28, the sub's sonar sphere—a giant golfball attached to the bow, containing
over 1,000 hydrophones—registered the sound of a short, sharp thud. Two minutes
and fifteen seconds later a powerful, fish-scattering boom vibrated through the
sensitive undersea microphones. The blast was so powerful, the equivalent of up
to two tons of TNT, that it was picked up by seismic stations more than 2,000
miles away.

On the
Kursk,
a room-size hole opened up in the forward torpedo room, turning the smooth
curved bow into a jagged bean can and sending the sub on a deadly dive to the
bottom. Sailors who didn't die immediately likely survived only hours. The
cause of the disaster was probably the onboard explosion of a missile or
torpedo. But given the long cat-and-mouse history of American submarine
espionage in the Barents Sea, senior Russian officials pointed the finger at an
undersea hit-and-run collision with a U.S. sub.

Six days
later, the
Memphis
surfaced and quietly sailed into a Norwegian port.
There it off-loaded boxes of recording tapes containing an electronic snapshot
of the worst submarine disaster in Russia's history—the undersea sounds of the
dying
Kursk
and the surface voices of the confused rescue efforts. The
tapes, flown to Washington, largely confirmed the theory that the tragedy was
caused by internal explosions. They also confirmed the continuing value of
sending eavesdroppers deep into the Barents Sea's perilous waters.

While many
listening posts were quietly built in distant places with tongue-twisting
names, others were built much closer to home. On an ancient English estate, an
elephant cage rose like a modern-day Stonehenge. Chicksands Priory, in what is
today Bedfordshire, dates to the time of William the Conqueror.

Once home
to an order of Gilbertine monks and nuns, by World War II Chicksands had become
host to a secret Royal Air Force intercept station. In 1948 the U.S. Air Force
moved in and began eavesdropping on Soviet communications. By mid-December of
the same year Chicksands was intercepting 30,000 five-figure groups of coded
traffic a day. Three years later, however, that number had skyrocketed to
200,000 groups a day.

Communications
security operators at Chicksands also began intercepting U.S. Air Force
communications. The operation was aimed at analyzing Air Force voice, Morse
code, and teletypewriter radio transmissions for violations of security. If
they could read the messages or pick up clues to pending operations, it was
assumed, so could Soviet eavesdroppers.

Earl
Richardson arrived at Chicksands to join the Security Service in 1953, fresh
out of communications school at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. Sitting
in front of a Hammarlund Super-Pro SP-600 high-frequency receiver mounted in a
rack, he would slowly turn the half-dozen black dials. His job was to search
for sensitive U.S. Air Force messages mistakenly sent in the clear; or identify
lazy communicators using made-up voice codes in a poor attempt to mask
classified information. The results were put in "Transmission Security
Analysis Reports" and sent out to offending commands. There, the radio
operator would receive a stern lecture and warning. According to one former
Chicksands operator, "Much of the caution was perverse and focused on not
being caught again by the Security Service, which in time came to be perceived
as an enemy more real than the Warsaw Pact."

Another
elephant cage quietly rose in the Scottish village of Edzell, a farming area
nestled in the foothills of the Grampian Hills, thirty-five miles south of
Aberdeen. It replaced listening posts in Bremerhaven, Germany, and in Morocco,
and soon became host to Army and Air Force eavesdroppers as well. A key target
was the shadowy Soviet merchant fleet.

While NSA
concentrated on building its electronic wall around the Communist world, much
of the Southern Hemisphere—South America and Africa—escaped close scrutiny.
That was one of the key reasons for building a Sigint navy. As the ships slid
out of dry dock, they began hauling their antennas and eavesdroppers to places
too difficult to reach with land-based listening posts and too remote for
regular airborne missions.

Tired of
the daily routine at the listening post in Bremerhaven, Aubrey Brown
volunteered for a ship NSA was having converted at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It
was late on a winter night when he arrived. As he boarded the gray-hulled USS
Oxford,
the decks were littered with acetylene tanks, welder's torches, and buckets
of iron rivets. After sea trials off Norfolk, Virginia, the ship set sail for
South America, a continent brimming with signals for its virgin ears, on
January 4, 1962.

At the
time, U.S. officials feared that the Communist "fever" that had
struck Cuba would spread throughout the continent. Later that month, in Punta
del Este, a beach resort in Uruguay, foreign ministers from the Organization of
American States were planning to meet to discuss many of these issues. The
meeting was seen by the U.S. State Department as an opportunity to push for
collective action against Cuba, such as a resolution that all countries still having
diplomatic and commercial ties with that nation move to break them. It was thus
a logical place for the
Oxford's
first mission.

As the
Oxford
sailed south, intercept operators eavesdropped on one of the assigned
targets, government communications links in British Guyana, considered very
sensitive because it belonged to our close Sigint partner, England.

Arriving
off Montevideo, on the north shore of the Rio de la Plata estuary, the
Oxford
was almost unnoticed amid the fleet of cargo ships heavy with wool, hides,
and textiles. On board, hidden below decks, the intercept operators tuned in,
listening for telephone calls and messages to and from the delegates attending
the conference a few miles east at the resort.

Afterward,
they moved a short distance west, up the Rio de la Plata to Buenos Aires.
"We would go into bays to intercept microwave links, and to really
intercept that well you had to have your receiving antenna in between their
transmitting antenna and their receiving antenna. So to do this we would get
into bays," said George A. Cassidy, an Elint specialist who sailed on a
later
Oxford
South American cruise. For microwave communications, which
contain a great deal of telephone and other voice communications, the Elint
operators used a piece of equipment called the RYCOM, which received the signal
and then broke it into hundreds of channels. "We were intercepting South
American military voice traffic," said Cassidy. "We would record on
magnetic recorders."

In
addition to receivers, a row of nearly a dozen printers constantly pounded out
intercepted teletype messages. "If it started printing out five-number
code groups, then we knew we had something," said Cassidy. "And if it
was Cyrillic, which was really a good find, then we had linguists aboard that
could read it. ... If it was a frequency that nobody had noted before, and it
was five-number code groups, that was a keeper. . . . We would save those and
they would go back to NSA."

Another
piece of equipment in the Elint spaces was so secret that it was hidden even
from the captain, although not for national security reasons. Forbidden to have
a TV on the ship, the intercept crew nevertheless rigged up a small one and
attached it to one of the rotating intercept antennas. It was painted gray, and
"Special Access" was written on it. "The captain came in for
inspection and had no idea what it was," said Cassidy, a veteran of
submarine espionage missions on the USS
Halfbeak.

Upon
leaving Buenos Aires on its first South American journey, the
Oxford
headed
for another target on its list, a large atomic research station in Argentina's
southern Patagonia region. However, according to Aubrey Brown, "the
weather conditions were so bad we couldn't get into that position. We tried to
do it for days, but we finally had to turn around and come back."

While off
the coast, the intercept operators did pick up information that the president
of Argentina had been overthrown. They whipped off a Flash message to NSA, but
because of atmospheric conditions, instead of three to five minutes, it took
hours to send. "By the time it got there I'm sure it was old news,"
said Brown. Although the ship had the moon-bounce dish, according to Brown it
seldom worked. "The moon-bounce mission was more cover story than anything
else," he said. "There were only one or two guys that were working on
it. We may have used it once or twice. It was mostly cover story."

On the way
north, more than fifty miles offshore, they ran into trouble. "At one
point when we were off Argentina," said Brown, "we were pursued by an
Argentine warship because we were not flying the flag. ... So they couldn't
identify us, didn't know what nationality. It was a relatively old Argentinean
naval vessel, but it was a warship. It pursued us because it wanted to know
what kind of ship we were. It was very unusual not to have colors. Nothing
flying from the mast. So we ran from it. They pursued us but we were monitoring
all the traffic to and from the ship, which was all Morse code. We finally
outran them."

Another of
the
Oxford's
missions was to attempt to locate spies in South America
who were thought to be communicating by ham radio. "So we set off on this
fool's mission to monitor all the ham communications in Latin America for these
spies who were communicating with each other on ham radio," said Brown.
"And of course there was nothing there."

Finally
the ship pulled into Rio de Janeiro. Brazil had great influence within Latin
America and was another major NSA target. Key elections were scheduled for May
and the CIA had spent truckloads of money to secretly influence the outcome.
Using several phony front organizations, the CIA dumped some $12 million, and
possibly as much as $20 million, on anticommunist candidates.

The
eavesdroppers had good fortune. The Brazilian navy welcomed the NSA ship and
put it in their naval area. Even better, the mooring they were assigned lay
between two microwave links carrying sensitive Brazilian naval communications.
According to Brown, the mooring "put the guys in the rear section, the
Elint people, in direct line of all the Brazilian navy microwave
communications. We copied everything we could when we pulled into port."

Passing
through the Caribbean on their way back to the United States, the Sigint
operators on the
Oxford
were often instructed by NSA to pay particular
attention to communication links between Fort-de-France, the capital of
Martinique in the French West Indies, and Dakar, Senegal, in West Africa. For
years Airne Cesaire, the Martinican writer and former Communist, had led an
independence movement on the island. Along with Leopold Sedar Senghor, the
president of Senegal, they were founders of the Negritude movement, which protested
French colonial rule. "Every time we got it [the link] up they wanted copy
from that," said George Cassidy. "It had something to do with the
Soviets. They [the intercepted messages] were code groups."

Cassidy
added, "A lot of times we would get messages from NSA or NSG [Naval
Security Group] and they would say, 'Here's a list of frequencies, keep an eye
on these things.' It was like going hunting. That was the mindset we were in.
We were on the ship and we were hunting for these things and when we found them
we felt pretty good."

Like South
America, Africa was becoming "hearable" as a result of NSA's
eavesdropping navy.

In its
earliest days, NSA had planned for its fleet of spy ships to be small, slow,
civilian-manned trawlers rather than the large floating listening posts such as
the USS
Oxford,
The model was to be the Soviet trawler fleet that
loitered off such places as the space launch center at Cape Canaveral and the
large submarine base at Charleston, South Carolina. "I was called to
Washington in the mid-fifties and asked could we monitor a Soviet Navy
maneuver," recalled retired Navy Captain Phil H. Bucklew, who was involved
in the Navy's Special Warfare program at the time. "They wanted me to rig
a fishing boat with electronic equipment and operate it in the Caspian Sea at a
time of the Soviet maneuvers and asked, 'Is it feasible?' I replied, 'I guess
it's feasible; it's starting from scratch. I don't welcome the opportunity but
I believe we would be the most capable source if you decide to do it.' I heard
nothing more on that."

Instead of
fishing trawlers with their limited space, the NSA chose to build its
eavesdropping fleet with small and ancient cargo vessels. "I was probably
the father of it at NSA," said Frank Raven, former chief of G Group, which
was responsible for eavesdropping on the non-Communist world. "It was one
of the first projects that I started when I got to G Group. . . . What we
wanted was a slow tub, that was civilian, that could mosey along a coast
relatively slowly, take its time at sea."