Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (48 page)

By the
time of the war with America, Ho was calling his code-makers
"cryptographic warriors" and ordering them to prevent loss of their
crypto materials at all cost. He would give examples of heroic deeds to
emulate. In 1962, they were told, Petty Officer Third Class Bui Dang Dzuong, a
cryptographer on a small ship, ran into fierce weather. Nevertheless, as the
boat was sinking he "destroyed the entire set of [cryptographic]
materials. . . . Big waves, heavy wind, and sapped of strength—Comrade Dzuong
gave his life." In another example, two cryptographers were injured during
an attack; one stepped on a mine "that snapped his leg" while the
other's "ears deafened and ran blood." Nevertheless, they
"calmly preserved the cryptographic system," and only after they were
relieved by a replacement did they go to the hospital. Following the lectures,
the youthful codemakers were sent "down the Ho Chi Minh trail into the
South to strike America."

The
Vietcong cryptographers learned their lessons well. While throwing an
electronic fishing net into the ether, they regularly reeled it back in bulging
with American communications; but they seldom used radios themselves. While
they listened to broadcasts from Hanoi on inexpensive transistor radios, they
sent messages back to their commands with couriers, except in dire emergencies.
For local communications, they often used radios with very low power,
frustrating American eavesdroppers.

From dusk
to dawn, the Vietcong ruled, in varying degrees, more than half of the South.
They marched over, under, and around the DMZ like worker ants. In the South,
supporters were recruited and resisters often shot.

Locating
the guerrillas so they could be killed or captured was the job of the radio
direction-finding specialists. Another operation, code-named White Birch,
involved eavesdropping on the nests of Vietcong infiltrators. A third, dubbed
Sabertooth, trained the South Vietnamese soldiers to intercept, locate, and
process plaintext voice communications.

The art of
codebreaking, however, was considered too sensitive to pass on to South
Vietnamese students.

Home for
the 3rd Radio Research Unit was an old hangar within the South Vietnamese
Army's Joint General Staff Compound at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. Temperature
inside the un-air-conditioned building regularly exceeded 100 degrees, and when
a monsoon downpour came, the water would rush in through the front door and
flood the space several inches deep.

Separating
the various sections were walls made of stacked C-ration boxes. The analysts
worked on long tables constructed of plywood and scrap lumber, but because
there were so few chairs, the table was made about four feet tall so they could
stand up while working. The NSA official assigned to the unit did little
better. "As a civilian from NSA," he said, "I was fortunate.
They made me a desk—two stacks of C-ration boxes with a piece of plywood laid
across them—and gave me a folding chair." Living conditions for the NSA
chief were much more comfortable. First assigned to the Majestic Hotel in
downtown Saigon, he was later moved to a two-bedroom villa he shared with an
ASA officer.

Within
seven months the Sigint force more than doubled. By December 1961, the secret
organization had grown to 236 men, along with eighteen intercept positions.
Listening posts stretched as far north as Phu Bai, near the DMZ, a choice spot
to pick up valuable cross-border communications. The school for training South
Vietnamese soldiers was set up at the South Vietnamese Army Signal Compound.

In the
field, the work was nerve-racking and dangerous. It was, said President
Kennedy, a "war by ambush rather than combat," one made up of
"guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins." Among the first
Army cryptologists to arrive in Vietnam was twenty-five-year-old James T.
Davis, a pharmacist's son from Tennessee whose words rolled off his tongue with
a honey-coated twang. Based at Tan Son Nhut, the specialist-4 was assigned to
search for Vietcong guerrillas in the tangled, overgrown jungle of giant ferns
and dirt paths near Saigon. Traveling with heavily armed South Vietnamese
soldiers, he needed to get close enough to the rebels so that his PRC-10 mobile
radio direction-finding equipment could pick up their short-range signals. But
if he got too close, he would become the hunted rather than the hunter. It was
a deadly game of hide-and-seek, in which the loser was attacked and likely
killed and the winner survived for another day.

Three days
before Christmas in 1961, Davis climbed into his jeep and, accompanied by his
team of South Vietnamese soldiers, set off for a new location to the west of
Saigon. But about eight miles from the air base, muzzle flashes from automatic
weapons cut across his path and he zigzagged to avoid the fire. A split second
later he heard a loud boom and was thrown to the ground as a powerful land mine
blew his jeep apart.

Davis
grabbed for his M-l carbine and he and the others opened fire. But by now they
were surrounded, and within minutes nine of his South Vietnamese troops had
been killed by machine-gun fire. A bullet crashed into the back of Davis's head
and he collapsed on the ground. The Vietnam War had claimed its first American
victim—a Sigint specialist. Two weeks later, the 3rd Radio Research Unit's
secret headquarters at Tan Son Nhut Air Base would be named Davis Station.
Eventually, a barracks at NSA headquarters would also bear his name.

In
Washington, that remote wave was beginning to swell and head toward shore.
Kennedy further Americanized the civil war, ordering the CIA to beef up its
covert operations far above the DMZ. Late at night, out of carbon-black skies,
billowing parachutes glided gracefully to earth. But the missions, to
infiltrate heavily armed South Vietnamese commandos into the North, were doomed
before they began as a result of poor security. Automatic fire instead of
friendly faces greeted most of the teams as they touched down at their landing
spots in the northern regions of North Vietnam.

Soon after
President Johnson moved into the White House, following Kennedy's assassination
in November 1963, the once far-off swell became a tidal wave about to crash. By
mid-1964 there were 16,000 U.S. troops in the country and the war was costing
American taxpayers about $1.5 million a day. Giving up on the disastrous CIA
infiltration scheme, Johnson instead ordered the Joint Chiefs to develop a much
more aggressive—but still "plausibly deniable"—operation that would
convince Ho to give up his war for the South. The answer was Operational Plan
34A—OPLAN 34A, in Pentagonese—an ill-conceived CIA/Pentagon scheme for sabotage
and hit-and-run attacks against the interior and coast of North Vietnam.

For a
quarter of a century Ho had fought for an independent, unified Vietnam,
successfully driving the heavily armed French back to Paris. Even Secretary of
Defense Robert S. McNamara thought OPLAN 54A made no sense. "Many of us
who knew about the 34A operations had concluded they were essentially
worthless," he recalled years later. "Most of the South Vietnamese
agents sent into North Vietnam were either captured or killed, and the seaborne
attacks amounted to little more than pinpricks."

Just as
U.S. and South Vietnamese forces fought back against the guerrillas from the
North, the North Vietnamese fought back against the commandos from the South,
on both land and sea.

Into the
middle of the fighting sailed NSA. According to an NSA report, "By
midsummer of 1964 the curtain was going up on the main event, and no single
element in the United States government played a more critical role in national
decisions, both during and after the fact, than the National Security Agency."

For
several years NSA's seagoing eavesdroppers, the Naval Security Group, had been
searching for ways to conduct signals intelligence along the coastal areas of
their high-priority targets. Long-range high-frequency North Vietnamese naval
communications could be collected at large, distant listening posts, such as at
Kamiseya in Japan and San Miguel in the Philippines. Other medium-range signals
could be snatched by the large NSA listening posts at Davis Station in Saigon
and at Phu Bai, near the DMZ. But to snare short-range signals, such as
walkie-talkie and coastal communications, the antennas and receivers would have
to get close to the action. Off limits were the large eavesdropping factories
owned exclusively by NSA, such as the USS
Oxford.
And far in the future
were the smaller, Navy-owned Sigint ships, such as the
Pueblo.

The only
alternative was to build Sigint shacks inside large steel antenna-sprouting
boxes. These shipping-container-like huts would then be lowered onto a
destroyer and sealed to the deck. The ship would then cruise close to a
shoreline, like a spy at a party with a bugged olive in his martini glass.

They were
far from ideal. Unlike the dedicated Sigint ships, which were virtually unarmed
and unthreatening in appearance, the heavily armed destroyers were designed to
be threatening and their presence was provocative. At the same time, the amount
of signals intelligence that could be collected in the steel box on the deck
was minuscule compared with what the dedicated ships could gather.

The Naval
Security Group began conducting these Sigint patrols, codenamed DeSoto, in
April 1962 with missions off China and North Korea. In January 1964, as they
were planning the OPLAN 34A hit-and-run operations, the Joint Chiefs ordered
additional DeSoto patrols off the North Vietnamese coast, in the Gulf of
Tonkin. The signals generated by the surprise coastal attacks, they assumed,
would be a good source of naval intelligence for the Sigint collectors. In
addition to voice communications, the locations and technical details of
coastal radar systems could be captured.

The first
mission was conducted by the USS
Craig
in late February 1964. Resting on
the ship's deck were both a Comint van for communications intelligence and an
Elint van for radar signals. But upon spotting an American warship idling
suspiciously a half-dozen miles off their coast, the security-conscious North
Vietnamese navy quickly switched off virtually all nonessential radar and
communications systems. Thus the Sigint take was poor.

At the
request of U.S. officials in Saigon who were planning the raids into North
Vietnam, another DeSoto mission was scheduled for the end of July 1964. It was
felt that if a DeSoto mission coincided with coastal commando raids, there
would be less chance of another washout. Chosen to host the electronic spies
was the USS
Maddox,
a standard Navy "tin can," as destroyers
were known. But whereas other ships had been ordered to stay at least thirteen
miles off the coasts of such countries as China, North Korea, and the Soviet
Union, the
Maddox
was authorized to approach as close as eight miles
from the North Vietnamese coast, and four miles from offshore islands.

Like
itinerant seamen, the Sigint vans would bounce from ship to ship, sailing off
the coast of China on one tin can and then off the coast of North Korea on
another. The crews also would change. One month a van might be filled with
Russian linguists and the next with Chinese. "Home" for the vans was
the port of Keelung in Taiwan. Because there were only a few available to cover
a large area, they were very much in demand. The one lowered onto the deck of
the
Maddox
had earlier been lifted from the deck of the USS
MacKenzie,
where, loaded with Russian linguists, it had eavesdropped off the Soviet
coast.

As the
Maddox
was about to enter the Gulf of Tonkin, tensions were very high. At My Khe,
a gritty stretch of coarse, hard-packed sand at the base of Monkey Mountain,
U.S. Navy SEALs were teaching South Vietnamese marines the science of
inflicting the maximum amount of death and destruction in the minimum amount of
time. The main base from which the raids to the north took place, the My Khe
compound was made up of a series of "compartmented" camps divided
along ethnic lines, and long wooden docks. Secretly run by U.S. forces, it was
a land of white phosphorus rockets and black rubber boats.

Late on
the night of July 30, 1964, as moonlight rippled across the choppy Gulf of
Tonkin, a raiding party of South Vietnamese commandos climbed aboard four
large, fast patrol boats. Several of the type known as PTFs—or, appropriately,
Nasty-
class
boats—were powered by diesel engines. The others were standard
American-made, gasoline-driven PT boats. The vessels were armed with 57mm light
infantry cannon. Bluish-gray exhaust gas shot from the rear of the guns, rather
than the muzzle, to reduce the amount of recoil so that they would be steadier
when used out of their mounts.

In the
early morning hours of July 31, about halfway up the North Vietnamese coast,
the boats blasted away at two offshore islands, Hon Me and Hon Ngu, in the most
violent of the South Vietnamese—U.S. raids thus far.

As the
boats were returning to My Khe later that same morning, their wake passed
within four miles of the
Maddox,
then just north of the DMZ. Viewed by
North Vietnamese coastal defense radars, the ships would have appeared to be
rendezvousing. The
Maddox
may also have been perceived as standing
guard, ready to fire at any boats seeking to cross the DMZ in hot pursuit of
the heavily armed patrol boats. It was well known that the United States was
behind virtually every South Vietnamese raid on the North.