Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (47 page)

By 2001
the
Pueblo
had been moved to a pier on the Taedong River, which flows
through Pyongyang, and opened to tourists. Visitors hear from two North Korean
sailors who took part in the capture and watch a video recording of the
incident.

Nevertheless,
for some former senior NSA, officials, the
Pueblo's
last battle is not
yet over. Led by a former NSA contractor who installed much of the ship's
Sigint equipment, they were angry that the United States did not grab the
Pueblo
back as it was moved, past South Korea, from one side of the country to the
other. They also quietly pressured the Clinton administration to seek the
return of the freshly painted and battle-scarred ship. "The sooner, the
better!" agreed retired Navy Commander Lloyd Bucher.

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In the
penultimate days before the North Korean attack on the
Pueblo,
NSA's
focus was on another troubled land severed along a degree of latitude: Vietnam.
For the 2 million people packed as tightly as bullet casings into the twenty
square miles of Saigon, the morning of January 22, 1968, began with a frenzy of
activity. Emergency vehicles, rushing to a trio of separate terrorist
incidents, performed pirouettes around fruit-laden shoppers. Overhead, a swarm
of helicopter gunships, like heavily armed locusts, searched back and forth
across an open field for Communist guerrillas. In front of a cloud of hazy blue
exhaust fumes, an American-made tank tore at a downtown pavement as the driver
took a shortcut to a convoy of vehicles heading north.

Amid the
war, life went on as normal. At a restaurant near the Central Market, passersby
inspected the barbecued chickens with their shiny lacquerlike coatings, hanging
from hooks in an open window. U.S. Air Force commandos in big hats and
low-slung revolvers sipped bitter espresso at a stand-up counter, like gunslingers
at a Wild West saloon. In the malodorous Ben Nghe Canal, gray wooden sampans
pushed slowly past shacks perched on narrow, spindly legs. Policemen in
tropical whites directed swirls of traffic at the broad circular intersections.

In the far
north on that Monday in January, at Firebase 861 near Khe Sanh, enemy soldiers
lobbed mortar rounds and rifle grenades. American troops fought back through
mailboxlike slits in the thick cement walls that protected them. Between
explosions, a Marine battalion arrived to reinforce the garrison. Landing
nearby were pallets containing 96,000 tons of ordnance. The day before, North
Vietnamese Army forces had begun a siege of the hilltop outpost, and the United
States was engaged in an all-out effort to save it.

In charge
of the American war was Army General William Westmoreland. On the afternoon of
January 22, at his Saigon headquarters, his major worry was the powerful attack
in the north on Khe Sanh. He compared it to the bloody assault on the French at
Dien Bien Phu more than a dozen years earlier. But Westmoreland was intent on
proving that massive firepower would allow the United States to succeed where
the French had dismally failed. He believed that sometime prior to Tet— the
Vietnamese New Year, nine days away—the guerrillas would launch a major attack
in the far north, at Khe Sanh and some of the surrounding bases. Thus, he began
focusing his men, munitions, and might in that high province. "I believe
that the enemy will attempt a countrywide show of strength just prior to
Tet," he cabled the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, "with Khe
Sanh being the main event." At the White House, President Johnson,
following the action like a front-row fan at a championship boxing match, had a
sand model of Khe Sanh built in the Situation Room.

But behind
the cipher-locked door leading to NSA's headquarters in Vietnam, a different
picture was beginning to emerge from analysis of enemy intercepts.

Twenty-three
years earlier, a large and excited crowd had gathered in Hanoi's Ba Dinh
Square, a grassy, festively decorated field a short distance away from the
graceful homes in the French district. They had walked there on callused feet
as tough as rawhide from the flooded rice fields of the Tonkin Delta, the muddy
banks of the Red River, the dock-sides of Haiphong, and the sampans of Halong
Bay. Bac Ho, the man they came to see and hear, stood before them, awkward and
slightly stooped. A frayed khaki tunic covered his skeletal frame, his feet
were clad in worn rubber sandals, and wispy black hairs hung from his bony chin
like dandelion fluff.

As the din
of the crowd began to fade, Bac Ho stepped forward on a wooden platform, his
glasses flashing in the sunlight. "We hold the truth
[sic]
that all
men are created equal," he said solemnly, borrowing a phrase from the
American Declaration of Independence, "that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness." The men and women in their drab pajamas and conical
straw hats exploded as Bac Ho, a onetime resident of Brooklyn, gave birth to
the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. By then, most knew him simply as Uncle Ho.
Those in the United States would later know him more formally as Ho Chi Minh—
Bringer of Light.

In a land
that had known little but torment, for a brief afternoon in September 1945, the
sun had never shined brighter. Like a tired horse that has bucked off its last
abusive owner, Vietnam had finally rid itself of its French and Japanese
masters. Gangly and serious, Ho Chi Minh looked more like a shy chemistry
professor than the leader of a guerrilla army. Born in central Vietnam in 1890,
he traveled widely as a merchant seaman, spent time in the United States,
learned seven languages, and saw communism as the most effective way to unite
his country to expel the colonialists. After an absence of thirty years, Ho
slipped back into Vietnam in 1941 disguised as a Chinese journalist. There he
formed the Vietnam Independence League—the Viet Minh—to beat back the French
colonizers, who had enslaved his country for decades, and the Japanese
warlords, who were attempting to take over much of Asia.

As the
Allied and Axis powers battled in Europe and Japan, Ho fought his own war in
the jungles of Vietnam—then French Indochina—using ambushes in place of
howitzers, and sabotage instead of bombers. After four years of trial and
error, he could have taught a doctorate-level course on the strategy of
guerrilla warfare. Finally, with the end of World War II and the defeat of
Japan, which was then occupying the country, Ho saw Vietnam's opportunity for
independence, which he proclaimed on September 2, 1945. Unbeknownst to Ho, by
the time of his proclamation America was already secretly eavesdropping on his
new country.

Although
defeated by Allied forces in August 1945, the Japanese occupiers remained in
Vietnam for another six months. During that time, American intercept operators
and codebreakers monitored communications to Tokyo from Japanese outposts in
Hanoi and Saigon. "Japanese reports back to Tokyo in the days before and
immediately after the surrender," said a later NSA report, "provide
some indication of how deep was the desire to throw off the yoke of
colonialism, how strong the
will to resist the return of the
French." The intercepts carried reports of Ho's forces secretly taking
into custody important Frenchmen, and "at nighttime there was
gunfire." Another said, "when one considers the situation after the
Japanese Army is gone, he cannot fail to be struck with terror."

Not yet
willing to give up their profitable rubber plantations and their global
prestige, the French colonizers moved back in the spring of 1946 as the
Japanese were pulling out. In so doing they arrogantly rejected the postwar
trend to begin loosing the chains of foreign domination, and once again began
to brutally exploit their distant colony. The moment of sunlight had passed;
Ho's war would continue in the darkness. In November shooting erupted in
Haiphong and the French bombarded the city, killing some 6,000 Vietnamese. On
December 19, the Vietnamese attacked the French. As an NSA report says,
"Thus began the Indochina War."

In the
United States, State Department Asian experts cautioned President Truman that
Vietnam was a powder keg and that pressure should be put on France to grant the
country "true autonomous self-government." The alternative, it warned
pointedly, would be "bloodshed and unrest for many years, threatening the
economic and social progress and peace and stability" of the region. CIA
analysts counseled that providing military aid to France to crush its
indigenous opposition "would mean extremely adverse reactions within all Asiatic
anti-'colonial' countries and would leave the U.S. completely vulnerable to
Communist propaganda."

Nevertheless,
while mouthing hollow platitudes about freedom and independence throughout the
world, Truman agreed to help France remount its colonial saddle, sending
millions of dollars in aid, weapons, and U.S. forces to help them fight Ho and
his rebels. At one point in 1952, a witless CIA officer at the U.S. embassy in
Hanoi hired a team of Chinese saboteurs, gave them some plastic explosives from
his stockpile, and sent them off to blow up a bridge. That they failed in their
mission should have been taken as a sign, like a fortune in a Chinese cookie.
But the blunders would only grow larger and more violent over the next two
decades.

Eisenhower also weighed in on behalf of colonialism, sending the
CIA to help the French beat back Ho and his forces. In November 1953, French
paratroopers occupied Dien Bien Phu in northwestern Vietnam, ten miles from the
Laotian border. Their plan was to lure Ho's rebel army into a trap in which
they would be slaughtered by superior French firepower. But the French
miscalculated and suddenly found themselves isolated, unable to keep resupplied
by air. As a result, Eisenhower agreed to an airlift using CIA men and planes
to fly supplies back and forth from Hanoi's Cat Bi airfield to Dien Bien Phu.

The
operation began on March 13, 1954, but the beleaguered French stood little
chance and Dien Bien Phu fell on May
7.
Over the two months it operated,
the CIA flew 682 airdrop missions. One plane was shot down and its two pilots
were killed; many other C-119s suffered heavy flak damage, and one pilot was
severely wounded.

Meanwhile,
NSA secretly eavesdropped on the conflict. "I recall very dramatically the
fall of Dien Bien Phu," said Dave Gaddy, an NSA official at the time.
"There were people with tears in their eyes. . . . We had become very
closely attached to the people we were looking over the shoulders of—the French
and the Viet Minh. And we could very well have sealed the folders, put
everything away, locked the files, shifted on to other things, and didn't. As a
result, we had a superb backing for what came along later."

Taking up
where the French left off, CIA operations continued in Indochina after the fall
of Dien Bien Phu. Between mid-May and mid-August, C-l 19s dropped supplies to
isolated French outposts and delivered loads throughout the country. The
French, driven by greed, would be replaced by the Americans, driven by
anti-Communist hysteria. This despite a secret State Department intelligence
report at the time saying that the department "couldn't find any hard
evidence that Ho Chi Minh actually took his orders from Moscow."

By the
time John F. Kennedy entered the White House in January 1961, Vietnam was a
wave in the distant ocean, barely visible; a thin white line slowly growing and
building. The French, at Dien Bien Phu, had been forced out after eight years
of fighting and scores of thousands of deaths. Left as a reminder was a ragged
demilitarized zone (DMZ) that cut across the narrow middle of the country like
a haunting dead zone; a no-man's-land separating the pro-Communist forces in
the North from the pro-Western forces in the South. Six hundred and eighty-five
American advisers were now in Vietnam and the financial commitment since 1954
topped $2 billion.

Pressured
by the Pentagon, which was concerned over growing reports of Communist
infiltration into South Vietnam, Kennedy ordered a few helicopter and Special
Forces units to the area. Then the Army began lobbying to also send signals
intelligence assistance. For years South Vietnamese officials had asked for
NSA's help in locating and eliminating Ho's infiltrators from the North, the
Vietcong. But Eisenhower had long rejected the requests, considering the
information and techniques far too secret.

Kennedy
reluctantly gave in to the Army's pressure. During a meeting of the National
Security Council on April 29, 1961, he authorized NSA to begin providing Sigint
support to the South Vietnamese Army. Sharing such sensitive information with a
foreign government was highly unusual, as reflected in the Top Secret/Codeword
"Communications Intelligence Regulation" that authorized the
transfer. Because "the current situation in South Vietnam is considered to
be an extreme emergency involving an imminent threat to the vital interests of
the United States," said the order, dissemination of Sigint to the South
Vietnamese military was authorized "to the extent needed to launch rapid
attacks on Vietnamese Communists' communications."

Vice
Admiral Laurence H. Frost, the director of NSA, ordered his military arm, the
Army Security Agency (ASA), to begin immediate preparations. Within weeks the
400th ASA Special Operations Unit (Provisional), using the cover name 3rd Radio
Research Unit and the classified NSA designation "USM 626," was
airborne. On May 13, 1961, the spit-shined boots of ninety-three Army
cryptologists stepped from a silver C-130 transport onto the tarmac of Saigon's
Tan Son Nhut Air Base. It was the Year of the Buffalo, symbolizing patience,
fruitful toil, and peaceful contentment, concepts that would be difficult to
find in a country on the precipice of all-out war. Green to combat, the Sigint
experts would have a difficult time hearing the enemy.

Ho's
twenty years in the underground taught him not only the art of guerrilla
warfare, but also how to keep a secret. Within days of his declaration of
independence, officials of the rebel government began addressing the issue of
codes and ciphers. "In the first days of the revolutionary regime,"
said a North Vietnamese document obtained and translated by NSA, "an
urgent requirement was to research methods of using cryptography so as to
ensure communications security." Ho himself warned a class of budding
codemakers: "Cryptography must be secret, swift, and accurate.
Cryptographers must be security conscious and of one mind."