Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (52 page)

Incredibly,
the United States was losing the code war the same way Germany and Japan lost
it in World War II. With the aid of the Russians, the North Vietnamese may have
been getting access to intelligence from NSA's most secure encryption systems,
gaining information like that obtained by breaking the German Enigma and
Japanese Purple codes during World War II. Even without that, they were
obtaining enormous amounts of Sigint, which frequently allowed them to escape
destruction and, instead, target American forces.

From the
very beginning, American commanders had an arrogant belief in U.S. military
superiority. They believed that the North Vietnamese military and jungle-based
Vietcong—the "gooks"—were far too unsophisticated to be able to make
sense of U.S. communications networks. After all, many commanders reasoned, how
could an army of soldiers who marched on sandals made of used tire treads be
taken seriously? "Most U.S. commanders in Vietnam," said an NSA
study, "doubted that the enemy could conduct successful Sigint operations.
These commanders reasoned that U.S. superiority in training, firepower, and
mobility made Comsec of little importance." The commanders, like their
defeated German and Japanese counterparts during World War II, would be wrong.

Compounding
the problem, the American military commanders would also ignore a second lesson
of World War II: they paid little heed to warnings derived through their own
signals intelligence.

On March
8, 1965, two Marine battalions stormed ashore at Da Nang, the first official
combat troops to be sent into the war. By the end of the year, the number of
American forces in Vietnam would swell to nearly 200,000. After a period of
relative calm, the Vietcong erupted throughout the country on May 11. More than
1,000 poured over the Cambodian border, a growing weak spot, and brought down
Songbe, a provincial capital about fifty miles north of Saigon.

To help
plug the Cambodian hole, the decision was made to send NSA's flagship, the USS
Oxford,
into the war zone. The
Oxford
would be the first seagoing Sigint
factory assigned to Vietnam. The orders were transmitted to the ship on May 26
to set sail immediately for Southeast Asia. At the time, the
Oxford
was
just completing a nearly four-month cruise off West Africa, where it had
stopped at Lagos and Durban, among other ports. Now not only were the crew
going to war rather than home, they were also told that from now on the ship's
homeport would be San Diego instead of Norfolk, a blow to those with families
on the East Coast.

"In
Africa we were looking at some of the local links," recalled George A.
Cassidy, an Elint intercept operator on the ship. "Anything that could be
Communist related. If we ever got anything Communist or Russian it was like a
feather in our cap. That was our main goal, to get something that had to do
with Russia."

Then came
the message from NSA. "We left Durban and were going around the other side
of South Africa for some reason," said Cassidy. "It was about three
o'clock in the afternoon. The captain came on and made an announcement. Guys
were really worried. I mean, you had guys who had marriages almost on the
rocks, and here they are, they're across on the other side of the world. Guys
had houses, families, cars, kids, wives, lovers, whatever, everything on the
East Coast, and we all said, Now we're going to Vietnam. ... I can tell you it
was probably almost the same lowering of morale, in a different way, which we
felt when Kennedy was shot."

On the
long voyage to Southeast Asia, Cassidy found a way to boost morale: he created
a photomontage of pictures taken by crewmembers in the various houses of
prostitution they had visited while on their many NSA Sigint voyages.
"Crewmembers would take photos in the whorehouses and bring them back
where another crewmember would develop the film," he said. "I would
swear them to secrecy that they wouldn't show it to anyone on the ship,
especially the officers, and I would keep an extra print of the good stuff. I
kept it locked away, a place nobody could find. It was in a big metal can up in
an air vent in the photo lab.

"So
after this happened [the orders to Vietnam], I was talking to some of the guys,
and they said why don't you make up a big poster board of all these pictures
and try to raise the morale a little. I said, 'I can't do this, I'll get
killed.' So I went to the captain and I told him what my idea was and he said,
'Well, if they're not really bad, explicit photographs it probably won't be a
bad idea.' So I went to each guy and asked if they would mind and nobody really
minded. And we put it up in the mess deck one afternoon. And I'll tell you, it
kind of brought the morale up a little bit. It was from photographs of guys
with women in Durban, the Canary Islands; I had some from the Caribbean, even.
And there were some from the Zurich Hotel in Valparaiso, Chile."

In Asia,
as elsewhere, all information concerning the
Oxford
was considered very
secret. Unfortunately, that made life difficult for those who were sent from
the United States to join it. One of those was John De Chene, who was trying to
get to the
Oxford
from California. "They tried to keep the
Oxford
movements very highly classified," he said. "First we went to
Subic Bay, Philippines, because that's where they had the
Oxford
listed.
We arrived at Clark Air Force Base and took a bus for four hours over back
roads to Subic. Once there, they told us it was actually at Yokosuka, Japan. So
we took the bus back to Clark and flew to Yokosuka, only to be told they'd
never heard of the ship. Later, however, someone said the ship was now off
Saigon. So we flew to Saigon and they said no, not here, she's now at Subic. We
went back to Subic and it wasn't there. Finally they sent out a fleet search.
Well, it had been sitting for two months in dry dock in Sasebo, Japan. So they
flew us in to a Marine base in Japan and then we had to take a Japanese train
all the way down to the lower islands and got to Sasebo the next morning and
there she was. We were probably in transit about a week."

Once out
of dry dock, the
Oxford
sailed to its assigned station in the Gulf of
Thailand, a remote area near An Thoi on the southern tip of Phu Quoc Island.
"We generally spent two months on station at our position on the border of
Cambodia/Vietnam, copying and recording all communications, both foreign and
friendly," said De Chene. "A lot of the time we were only about two
miles off the coast." It was a very good position to eavesdrop on and DF
[direction-find] the hundreds of units in the area."

The ship
would occasionally pull in to An Thoi so that Ray Bronco, the ship's postal
clerk, could pick up and drop off mail. One day he accidentally discovered that
An Thoi was also home to a prison camp for captured Vietcong. "I was on
the back of a flat pickup truck with all these bags of mail going to the
U.S.," he said. "A C-130 troop transport flew in and landed on an
airstrip. I was probably about fifty yards or less away. It turned and the tail
end almost lined up to the back of the truck. The back door opened up and out
ran about thirty to fifty screaming Vietcong. They came charging toward me. The
Marines fired over their head. They didn't realize that there was an innocent
bystander there. I still have flashbacks and post-traumatic stress over
it."

Later, the
Oxford's
sister ship, the USS
Jamestown,
was also ordered to the
area. The
Jimmy-T,
as it was known, was assigned to the South China Sea
around Saigon and the Delta region. "There was always a rivalry between
our sister ship . . . and us," said Richard E. Kerr, Jr. "In the aft
ops area, we had a huge wooden hand carved into the classic 'the bird'
position. I do not know the story behind it, but I think it had some funny
inscription like, 'From one sister to another.' "

Down
below, in the
Oxford's
forward NSA spaces, intercept operators listened
with highly sensitive KG-14 multichannel receivers. To translate the
information, the Sigint unit had linguists qualified in Lao/Thai, several
Chinese dialects, Russian, and Vietnamese. Among the intercept operators on
board was at least one qualified in Tagalog, the language of the Philippines.
"We did as much processing as we could," recalled De Chene.
"Fort Meade wanted both recordings and transcripts and our breakdowns of
it. Pretty much full scope of as much as we could cover . . . For about two
weeks we had one NSA guy on board. He kept to himself. I don't think anybody
knew why he was there." In the aft area, Elint operators collected the
signals of hundreds of radar systems on huge reels of Mylar tape attached to
32-track Ampex recorders.

Among the
most important assignments during the
Oxford's
years in Southeast Asia
was the Seven Nations Manila Summit Conference, which took place in the
Philippine capital on October 23—27, 1966. Anchored in Manila harbor, right
across from the Stanley Point Naval Air Station, the ship was able to eavesdrop
on the negotiations. Thus, American negotiators got a leg up by discovering the
strategies and arguing points of the other players. At one point, intercept
operators on the ship "uncovered a plot," said De Chene, "to
assassinate [U.S. President Lyndon B.] Johnson, [Philippine President Ferdinand
E.] Marcos, and I think Nguyen Cao Ky." The plotters were members of the
Communist-inspired Huk movement. As a result of the intercept operators'
warning, every member of the ship received a letter of commendation.

The Sigint
personnel and the rest of the ship's crew, referred to as general service
personnel, were in effect segregated. "The general service personnel had
no idea what we did, or how we did it," said De Chene. "All they knew
was at the commencement of the workday, we would file behind those security
doors, both fore and aft of the ship, and we would reappear at noon for chow.
For the most part, they stayed away from us and in greater or lesser degrees,
we, them. It was as if there were two different
Oxfords,
and I guess
there really were." Ray Bronco agreed: "They [the Sigint personnel]
were in a world of their own."

In July
1966, NSA decided to have the
Jamestown
temporarily relieve the
Oxford
and send
Oxford
to conduct signals intelligence operations along the
coast of mainland China. At the time the secretive and violent Cultural
Revolution was going on. "After about two weeks of cruising up and down
China's coastline," said De Chene, "our results were fairly meager at
best. From all appearances, the Chinese knew when and where we were going to be
and for the most part, their communications transmissions were held to a bare
minimum, or none at all."

But while
the eavesdropping proved quite boring, the South China Sea gave them more
excitement than they desired. Typhoon Ora was moving rapidly toward the
Oxford,
"We were taking severe rolls," De Chene recalled, "and the
storm was growing stronger. The following day all hell broke loose. We lost a
boiler and we were now dead in the water, almost at the center of the typhoon.
We were drifting, and the wind was pushing us right into the coastal waters of
Red China."

An
emergency message went out for help and a fleet tug was dispatched for rescue.
But more than a day went by without any sign of help. "All hands were now
briefed on our full situation," said De Chene, "and advised that an
abandon ship order might be given, and the CTs [communications technicians]
were put on standby to destroy all equipment and documents. The captain also
considered putting our utility boat and his gig in the water to possibly either
start towing the ship or at least slow her drift. At this point we were
approximately twenty miles from the beach, or eight miles from Chinese coastal
waters. Finally, after drifting inland for two more miles, the tug made its
appearance and shot us her lines. She then towed us back to Taiwan and out of
harm's way of both capture and the storm."

The war in
Vietnam was layered, like a wedding cake, and it was fought from the ground up.
After the ambush death of James Davis as he prowled through the jungle near
Saigon attempting to pinpoint enemy signals, NSA began experimenting with
direction finding from the air. "Since radio wave propagation in Southeast
Asia required that DF equipment be very close to the transmitter," said an
NSA report, "the obvious answer was to go airborne."

While some
airborne Sigint and DF missions required enormous planning, others were
seat-of-the-pants, such as the chopper missions. Flying near treetop level just
south of the DMZ were intercept operators in UH-1H "Huey"
helicopters. With antennas duct-taped to the chopper's skids, the operators
searched for North Vietnamese Army communications signals. Inside, a Vietnamese
linguist listened for infiltrators through earphones attached to a captured
North Vietnamese Army backpack radio. "They used to make them out of their
beat-up green .50-caliber ammo cans," said one intercept operator.
"It had a few dials on it with Chinese characters."

The pilots
on board had KY-58 secure voice systems to quickly and secretly pass the
time-sensitive information back to base. "Most of the time we were flying
we picked up their communications," said the intercept operator, "so
you would get a lot of information. But it would be very time-critical. The
units were always on the move, so if you didn't get the information back really
quick it would be of little use. Tactical intelligence is very of-the-moment,
versus strategic, which is long-range, overall planning." Once NVA units
were located, airborne or ground troops would be sent in after them.