Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (6 page)

Nevertheless,
from the messages that the United States was able to intercept, it was clear
that the two groups preferred to settle their differences on the battlefield
rather than at the conference table. As a result, the Marshall mission was
withdrawn in 1946. Thereafter, ASA dropped its study of Chinese Communist
military ciphers and communications and turned its attention almost exclusively
toward Russia. It would prove a serious mistake. Three years later, in 1949,
Mao triumphed and Chiang fled to the island of Formosa.

About the
same time, a small team of Chinese linguists led by Milton Zaslow began
eavesdropping on and analyzing Chinese civilian communications—private
telephone calls and telegrams. Unencrypted government messages would also
travel over these lines. Beginning in early summer 1950, AFSA began developing
"clear and convincing evidence" that Chinese troops were massing
north of the Yalu River.

In May and
June, Sigint reports noted that some 70,000 Chinese troops were moving down the
Yangtze River in ships toward the city of Wuhan. The next month a message
intercepted from Shanghai indicated that General Lin Piao, the commander of
Chinese army forces, would intervene in Korea. Later reports noted that rail
hubs in central China were jammed with soldiers on their way to Manchuria. By
September, AFSA had identified six field armies in Manchuria, near the Korean
border, and ferries on the Yalu River were being reserved for military use.

All of
these reports were fully available to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White
House, and to General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the UN forces.
Nevertheless, when asked by President Truman on October 15 about the chances of
Chinese intervention, MacArthur replied, "Very little."

The
indications continued. On October 21, AFSA issued a Sigint report stating that
twenty troop trains were heading toward Manchuria from Shanghai. Then, on
November 7, AFSA intercepted a radio-telephone call made by an East European in
Beijing. He reported that orders had been issued allowing every Chinese soldier
to volunteer to fight in Korea, saying, "We are already at war here."
That same month, intercept operators picked up an unencrypted order for 30,000
maps of Korea to be sent from Shanghai to the forces in Manchuria.

Finally,
intercepts during the first three weeks of November revealed that Beijing was
in a state of emergency, with authorities sponsoring mass demonstrations
demanding intervention, imposing more stringent censorship, improving air
defense, and commanding that any soldier or officer could volunteer to serve in
Korea. A medical headquarters urgently ordered troops in Manchuria to receive
immunizations for diseases that were prevalent in North Korea—smallpox,
cholera, and typhoid fever. AFSA reports demonstrated clearly that the Chinese
were making extensive preparations for war.

But
despite the many Sigint clues, U.S. and South Korean forces were once again
caught by surprise. Early on the bitter-cold morning of November 26, with
trumpets braying, thirty Chinese divisions surged across the North Korean
border and forced U.S. and South Korean armies to make a precipitous retreat
southward, costing the lives of many American soldiers.

"No
one who received Comint product, including MacArthur's own G-2 [intelligence
chief] in Tokyo, should have been surprised by the PRC intervention in the
Korean War," said a recent, highly classified NSA review. The review then
pointed a finger of blame for the disaster directly at MacArthur. "During
the Second World War, MacArthur had disregarded Comint that contradicted his
plans," it said. "MacArthur's zeal [to press ahead] to the Yalu
probably caused him to minimize the Comint indicators of massive PRC intervention
just as he had earlier minimized 'inconvenient' Comint reports about the
Japanese. He thus drove his command to great defeat in Korea."

By
mid-1951, with the 38th Parallel roughly dividing the two sides, ASA
headquarters was established in the western suburbs of Seoul, on the campus of
Ewha College, the largest women's school in Asia. There, traffic analysts put
together a nearly complete Chinese army order of battle. Also, when truce
negotiations began in July 1951, ASA units eavesdropped on meetings among the
North Korean negotiating team. But that same month, the earphones of most of
the intercept operators went silent as the North Koreans switched much of their
radio communications to the security of landlines. NSA later attributed this
caution to secrets allegedly passed to the Russians by former AFSA employee
William Weisband.

Toward the
end of the war, there were some tactical successes. By 1952, AFSA had broken a
number of Chinese cipher systems. "The . . . last three major pushes that
the Chinese had against us, we got those lock, stock, and barrel, cold,"
recalled Odonovich. "So that when the Chinese made their advances on our
positions they were dead ducks . . . we had the code broken and
everything."

But
critical high-level communication between and among the Chinese and North
Koreans was beyond the AFSA codebreakers' reach. Gone was the well-oiled
machine that had helped win World War II. In its place was a confusing
assortment of special-interest groups, each looking upon the other as the
enemy; no one had the power to bring them together. "It has become
apparent," complained General James Van Fleet, commander of the U.S.
Eighth Army in June 1952, "that during the between-wars interim we have
lost, through neglect, disinterest and possibly jealousy, much of the
effectiveness in intelligence work that we acquired so painfully in World War
II. Today, our intelligence operations in Korea have not yet approached the
standards that we reached in the final year of the last war." A year later
NSA director Ralph Canine, an Army lieutenant general, concurred with Van
Fleet's observation.

So bad was
the situation that in December 1951 the director of the CIA, Walter Bedell
Smith, brought the problem to the attention of the National Security Council.
In his memorandum, Smith warned that he was "gravely concerned as to the
security and effectiveness with which the Communications Intelligence
activities of the Government are being conducted." He complained that
American Sigint had become "ineffective," as a result of the "system
of divided authorities and multiple responsibilities."

Smith then
discreetly referred to the mammoth security breach, blamed on Weisband, that
had led the Soviets to change their systems. "In recent years," he
said, "a number of losses have occurred which it is difficult to attribute
to coincidence." To preserve what he called "this invaluable
intelligence source"—Sigint—Smith called on Truman to ask Secretary of
Defense Robert A. Lovett and Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson to conduct a
"thorough investigation" of the agency. Three days later, on December
13, 1951, Truman ordered the investigation.

Appointed
to head the probe was George Abbott Brownell, a fifty-three-year-old New York
attorney and former special assistant to the secretary of the Air Force. Over
six months, Brownell and his committee of distinguished citizens took AFSA
apart and put it together again. In the end, they viewed AFSA as a "step
backward." By June 13, 1952, when he turned his report over to Lovett and
Acheson, Brownell had a blueprint for a strong, centralized new agency with a
director more akin to a czar than to the wrestling referee the post resembled.
Both secretaries approved and welcomed the independent review and set about
carrying out its recommendations.

Four
months later on October 24, Lovett, David K. Bruce from the State Department,
and Everett Gleason of the NSC entered the Oval Office for a 3:30
off-the-record meeting with the president. There, Truman issued a highly secret
order scrapping AFSA and creating in its place a new agency to be largely
hidden from Congress, the public, and the world. Early on the morning of
November 4, as Truman was leaving a voting booth in Independence, Missouri, the
National Security Agency came to life. But few gave the new agency much hope.
"The 'smart money' was betting that the new organization would not last
much longer than AFSA," scoffed one official.

That
night, Dwight David Eisenhower was elected the thirty-fourth president of the
United States.

JFKH WRXSHN WRLFGJN USKH FXZHQNL
EFI (IFYX) OZL NJYFI, ENXTNL ISHROTNN, PWFMT WSENT UJIFHR MSERW OSJV MSPJOV MJQ
IBM NGNM NZIIJ JZK KA JZII NZIIHAYZ KA JHWZDHZ GCCIWHGKWADJ HAYC. EOYHWCFO
QWPSOLSL KOCSMZH RQ PUOW ZRYYMGMOF LOWEMCZ UPSO ZNLKIYA DYAAKID LNVYV;
VYCABZGKID XKTTC ZTKIABI'C UYYGYIW NDYIWN

Alongside
Greenland's North Star Bay, thick with pack ice, the RB-47 taxied up to a
10,000-foot runway. Strapped into the left-hand seat, the command pilot looked
over and saw his detachment commander flash the green light for three seconds:
he could start his engines.

Nicknamed
the Strato-Spy, the RB-47 was the Ferrari of electronic spy planes during the
1950s and early 1960s, with a speed of over 500 miles per hour and a ceiling of
about 41,000 feet. Using the basic frame of a B-47 bomber, it was designed from
the ground up strictly for eavesdropping. Its sleek silver wings, swept back at
a 35-degree angle, were so long and heavy the tips drooped close to the ground.
Weighing them down were six powerful turbojets capable of producing 6,000
pounds of thrust each. Like giant training wheels, landing gear extended from
the two engines closest to the bullet-shaped fuselage. And to get off a short
runway in a hurry, its fuselage was designed to accommodate thirty-three
powerful rockets that could produce an instantaneous 1,000 pounds of thrust
each.

For
listening, the plane's shiny aluminum belly was covered with an acnelike
assortment of discolored patches, bumps, pods, and appendages, each hiding a
unique specialized antenna—about 400 in all. A twelve-foot-long pod containing
even more antennas and receivers was occasionally suspended from the right side
of the aircraft.

The
airborne electronic espionage operations, known as ferret missions, were so
secret that the crews were forbidden from mentioning their aircraft, unit, or
home base, or saying anything about their operations. "We usually snuck
into our deployment base under the cover of darkness," said one RB-47
veteran, "and were hidden away on the far side of the field or in an
isolated hangar well away from all other activities." Some detachment
commanders forbade the crews even to be seen together in public. And, to avoid
tipping off any spy that they were about to activate, crews would occasionally
wear civilian work clothes over their flight suits when going to the flight
line for a mission.

Ten
minutes before takeoff at North Star Bay, the command pilot saw the green light
flash twice for three seconds, clearing him to taxi out to the active runway.
His engines gave an ear-piercing whine as he slowly turned into takeoff
position. Once aboard the aircraft, the crew would maintain absolute radio
silence in order to frustrate any Soviet electronic monitoring equipment. Even
communication with ground control before takeoff was restricted to these brief
light signals.

In the
center of the plane, separated from the cockpit by a narrow crawlspace, were
the three "Ravens"—Air Force officers who were specialists in
electronic intelligence. Packed in the tight space of what would normally have
been the bomb bay, and surrounded by bulky electronic equipment, a Raven could
be "excruciatingly uncomfortable," said former Raven Bruce Bailey, a
veteran of hundreds of missions against the Soviet Union. On a typical flight,
he said, the idea was to "stuff" the Ravens "into unbelievably
cramped, noisy, dangerous hellholes and assure that they have a
pressurization/air-conditioning system that doesn't work, ample fuel leaks, no
acceptable method of escape, and can not move around in flight."

The Ravens
were confined for up to a dozen hours in a compartment only four feet high.
"Not only was it impossible to stand," said Bailey, "there
wasn't even enough room for a good crouch. Most movement was made on your knees
or in a crawl." Noise was also a major problem. "The compartment had
no insulation and its thin aluminum walls were nestled right between and
slightly behind the six engines. In addition . . . antennas and pods attached
to the fuselage caused the skin to buffet and vibrate badly, adding to the
noise."

Finally,
as the aircraft leveled off, fuel would occasionally puddle in the compartment,
filling the space with fumes. "With all the electrical gear and heat in
the cabin, raw fuel made it a potential bomb," the former Raven pointed
out. "When fuel was discovered, you immediately turned off all electrical
power and depressurized the cabin. Then you hoped to get [the plane] on the
ground before it blew up." Bailey, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel,
called the RB-47 Strato-Spy "an ugly, overweight, underpowered,
unforgiving, uncomfortable, dangerous, and noisy airplane." Nevertheless,
he added, "all of us who flew in it eventually grew to love it."

The
entrance to the Raven compartment was a two-foot-square hatch on the bottom
side of the fuselage. Once the three Ravens were aboard, the hatch would be
sealed from the outside with forty-eight large screws. Squeezed together in the
small space, all facing aft, the electronic spies were surrounded by scopes,
receivers, analyzers, recorders, and controls.

Raven One,
the commander of the group, sat in the right forward corner of the cabin. In
addition to banks of equipment in front and to his left, he had a wide array of
analog, video, and digital recorders stacked tight along the wall to his right
and behind him. During the flight, he would keep his ears finely tuned for
airborne-intercept radar signals from hostile Soviet fighters. From the sound
and the wavy lines on his scopes, he could tell just how threatening those
fighters might be. Raven Two, who listened for Soviet ground control and
intercept radar systems, would be the first to know when the Strato-Spy was
being tracked. Raven Three was responsible for analyzing the Soviet early warning
and missile guidance signals, one of the principal objectives of the mission.

With two
minutes to go, his preflight checks completed, the navigator began the
countdown to takeoff. He was seated facing forward in the black nose of the
plane, just below and in front of the pilot. His cabin was darkened so he could
better see his radarscopes; his only natural light came from two small windows
above his seat.

At one
minute to takeoff, a steady green light signaled to the command pilot that he
was cleared to fly the mission. With a deafening roar, he eased forward on the
throttles, bringing his engines up to 100 percent power. By then the brakes
were bucking and straining as they fought to hold back 36,000 pounds of forward
thrust. The pilot carefully stabilized the engines.

Ten
seconds before the zero mark the pilot flipped the water-alcohol injection
switches, giving the plane a powerful boost so that it suddenly jumped forward
briefly, like a lion about to pounce. From the half-dozen turbojets, thick
clouds of heavy black smoke filled the sky.

At exactly
ten o'clock the spy plane shuddered and let out a loud scream as the pilot
released the brakes. Lumbering at first, the quarter-million pounds of steel
and flesh were soon racing down the long frozen runway at nearly 200 miles per
hour, leaving behind a gray trail of smoke and mist. A "ground
lover," the heavy bird required well over two miles of surface for
liftoff. As the concrete began to run out, the pilot pulled firmly back on his
yoke and the aircraft knifed gracefully skyward.

In the
spring of 1956 perhaps the most serious and risky espionage operation ever
undertaken by the United States was launched. President Eisenhower authorized
an invasion of Russian airspace by armed American bombers carrying
eavesdropping gear and cameras instead of nuclear weapons. Details of the
operation are still wrapped in great secrecy.

Nicknamed
Project Homerun, the operation was staged from an air base near the frozen
Eskimo village of Thule, Greenland, a desert of ice and snow 690 miles north of
the Arctic Circle. In the purple-black of the polar winter, aircraft mechanics
labored in —35° temperatures to prepare the nearly fifty bombers and tankers
that would play a role in the massive incursion, one of the most secret
missions of the Cold War. Housing for the flight and maintenance crews
consisted of temporary buildings that looked like railroad refrigerator cars.

The
mission was to penetrate virtually the entire northern land-mass of Russia, a
bleak white 3,500-mile-long crescent of snow-covered permafrost stretching from
the Bering Strait near Alaska to Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula in European
Russia. At the time, little was known about the vast Soviet Arctic region. Yet,
because a flight over the North Pole was the shortest way for Russian bombers
and missiles to reach the U.S. mainland, it was the most likely battleground
for the next war. At the same time, it was also the most likely route for an
American invasion of Russia. Thus any Soviet radar operator seeing the bombers
would have no way of knowing that the mission was espionage and not war.
Despite the enormous risks of igniting World War III, President Eisenhower
approved the operation.

On March
21, 1956, a group of RB-47 reconnaissance bombers took off for target locations
within Russia. Almost daily over the next seven weeks, between eight and ten
bombers launched, refueled over the North Pole, and continued south across the
Russian border to their assigned locations.

They flew
in teams of two. One RB-47H ferret would pinpoint and eavesdrop on radar, air
bases, and missile installations. Nearby, an RB-47E photoreconnaissance plane
would gather imagery. Their assignments included overflying such sensitive
locations as Novaya Zemlya, the banana-shaped island where Russia carried out
its most secret atomic tests. From moment of takeoff to moment of landing,
absolute radio silence was required, even during the occasional chase by a MiG.
"One word on the radio, and all missions for the day had to abort,"
said Brigadier General William Meng, one of the officers who ran the
penetration operation. "But that never happened; not one mission was ever
recalled."

As in a
Fourth of July fireworks display, the most spectacular mission was saved for
the end. On May 6, they began the single most daring air operation of the Cold
War, a "massed overflight" of Soviet territory. The point was to
cover a great deal of territory, quickly. Six armed RB-47E aircraft, flying
abreast, crossed the North Pole and penetrated Russian airspace in broad
daylight, as if on a nuclear bombing run. They entered above Ambarchik in
western Siberia, then turned eastward, collecting valuable intelligence as they
passed over key Russian air bases and launch sites on their way toward Anadyr on
the Bering Strait. Nearly a dozen hours after it began, the massed overflight
ended when the spy planes touched down at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska.

Within
minutes of the landing, the recording tapes were sent by a special courier
flight to NSA for analysis. They revealed no Soviet radar signals—proof that,
at least for the time being, Russia was blind to an over-the-pole attack by
American nuclear bombers. The vast sweep of frozen tundra making up Russia's
northern frontier was virtually radar-free. Nevertheless, no one dared
speculate on how the mission might have ended if hidden Soviet radar
installations had picked up the incoming bombers and believed that they were
sent on an American surprise attack. With only seconds to spare, the Russians
might well have launched a counterattack, with devastating results.

In all,
156 eavesdropping and photo missions were flown over Russian airspace during
the almost two months of Project Homerun without the loss of a single aircraft—and
without a nuclear war. Nevertheless, Moscow was well aware of the air invasion.
Eight days after the massed overflight, a protest note was delivered to the
American ambassador in Moscow. Publicly, however, the Kremlin said nothing; the
humiliation would have been too great.

Throughout
the 1950s the ferrets, like mosquitoes hunting for an exposed patch of skin,
buzzed the long Soviet border. They were searching for holes in Russia's vast
fence of air-defense radar sites. At the time, the Soviet military had not yet
completed work on a nationwide network. Nor was much of the interior protected.

As a CIA
report points out, human spies had effectively been put out of action.
"The stringent security measures imposed by the Communist Bloc
nations," said the study, "effectively blunted traditional methods
for gathering intelligence: secret agents using covert means to communicate
intelligence, travelers to and from target areas who could be asked to keep
their eyes open and report their observations later, wiretaps and other
eavesdropping methods, and postal interceptions. Indeed, the entire panoply of
intelligence tradecraft seemed ineffective against the Soviet Bloc, and no
other methods were available."

But while
the Communist governments of Eastern Europe and Asia could draw impenetrable
iron curtains around their countries, hiding such things as the development of
nuclear weapons and missile technology, they could not build roofs over them.
Nor could their armed guards halt the continuous streams of invisible signals
escaping across their borders.

While the
eavesdropping bombers occasionally flew deep into Soviet airspace, other ferret
missions engaged in the dangerous game of fox and hounds. Probing and teasing
the hostile air defense networks, they would dart back and forth across
sensitive borders, daring the Soviets to react. There was no other way to force
the missile batteries and border defense installations to turn on their secret
tracking equipment and thus enable the American signal snatchers to capture the
precious electrons. Once analyzed, the information enabled war planners to
determine where the holes were and how best to build equipment to counteract
the radar and fire control systems.