Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (64 page)

Faced with
the ordered cuts, Faurer fought back, arguing that the reductions could lead to
erosion of future intelligence capabilities. His continued resistance
"created a big fuss in the intelligence community," said one
official. As a result, "to put an end to the agonizing over this
issue," Cap Weinberger reportedly suggested that Faurer speed up his retirement.
Faurer then decided to "go out in a blaze of glory," said one report,
by submitting his retirement papers immediately, on March 19. A week later he
was gone. The Pentagon denied that Faurer was pressured to leave.

Faurer's
premature departure put the Pentagon on the spot to quickly come up with a
replacement. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended to Weinberger the name of a
Navy admiral, but the CIA's Casey reportedly found him unacceptable because he
had only one year's experience in the intelligence field. Next in line was
Lieutenant General William Odom, the Army's intelligence chief. Despite
objections from some within the Reagan administration, who were unhappy that
Odom had served in the Carter White House, and others, who wanted to see Odom instead
take over the Defense Intelligence Agency, he was formally installed on May 8,
1985, six weeks after Faurer's stormy departure.

A balding,
owl-faced officer with large round glasses, who once taught Russian history at
West Point, Odom had risen rapidly in rank and position as a result of the
backing of Zbigniew Brzezinski. The two met at Columbia, where Brzezinski was a
professor and Odom was attending graduate school while in the Army. Eventually
Odom, an arch-conservative military hard-liner, became Brzezinski's military
assistant, picking up the nickname "Zbig's Super-Hawk." While in the
Carter administration, Odom worked on such issues as the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan and the Iranian capture of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. He quickly
rose to the rank of brigadier general. Shortly after President Reagan moved
into the White House, Odom took over the top job in Army intelligence.

Odom,
stern, abrasive, and humorless, was widely disliked at NSA and was considered
by many the most ineffective director in the agency's history. He also
developed a reputation as a Captain Queeg of secrecy, claiming that
intelligence leaks to the news media had resulted in "paralysis" and
"major misjudgments" in U.S. foreign and military policies and could
lead to war. As examples he cited the diminution in the U.S. ability to follow
and deal with terrorist activities and the failure to properly gauge Soviet
strategic force growth in the 1960s and 1970s. "Quite simply," Odom
told a group of old spies, "there is no comprehensive 'right to know'
included, either explicitly or implicitly, within the First Amendment." He
added, "Perhaps if the public were informed of the damage done, the media
would be compelled to provide a better accounting for their actions." But
Odom was an extremist on secrecy, equating journalists with spies and calling
one an "unconvicted felon" for daring to write about NSA.

Odom was
also critical both of Congress and of other officials within the Reagan
administration whom he blamed for leaks. "There's leaking from
Congress," he informed the group; "there's more leaking in the
administration because it's bigger." Then he seemed to name President
Reagan as the worst leaker of all. The previous year Reagan had publicly blamed
Libya for the terrorist bombing of the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin—a
club known to attract off-duty U.S. servicemen—which killed two American
soldiers and a
Turkish woman, and injured 250 other people. Reagan
ordered a retaliatory strike against Tripoli and then appeared on national
television. In order to justify the attack by American aircraft, Reagan
summarized three Libyan messages intercepted by NSA as "irrefutable"
proof of Libya's involvement in the bombing. In doing so he no doubt made it
clear to the country's leader, Muammar Qaddafi, that he'd better change his
codes or get new crypto equipment. In his blast over leaks Odom said,
"Leaks have damaged the system more in the past three to four years than
in a long, long time." Then, asked about the disclosure of the Libyan
intercepts, which had been revealed by President Reagan, Odom said,
"Libya, sure. Just deadly losses." He refused, however, to elaborate.

Odom also created a storm over his handling of the aftermath of  the
Iran-contra scandal. In December 1985, as a cabal of Washington officials,
including William Casey, plotted to send missiles to Iran in exchange for the
release of hostages being held in Lebanon, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North
of the National Security Council staff turned to NSA for help. He wanted a
number of specially designed "KY-40" laptop computers containing
secure encryption chips so he and his fellow conspirators could communicate
secretly via e-mail while traveling.

At the
suggestion of a fellow staffer on the NSC, North was referred to John C.
Wobensmith, a senior official in NSA's Information Systems Security
Directorate, which is responsible for developing, distributing, and keeping
track of all codemaking equipment. North told Wobensmith the machines were needed
for his work with American hostages in Lebanon. Because it was a covert
operation, North said, he decided to deal with NSA himself.

Wobensmith
claims that shortly after he was approached by North he walked up to Odom, who
was passing between offices, and had a brief stand-up conversation with him.
"I know you are supporting Colonel North," Wobensmith says Odom told
him. "I authorize you to continue doing that support, give him what he
needs, give him a couple of KY-40s if he needs them." Odom later said he
did not recall the conversation. Wobensmith passed on the computers to North
but failed to have him sign a receipt for them, a fact that would later come
back to haunt him.

Two years
later, following the devastating scandal that erupted as a result of the
Iran-contra affair, a senior official at NSA recommended that Wobensmith be
suspended without pay for fifteen days for the slipup over the receipt and for
giving inadequate instructions to North about the KY-40s' use. But a
four-member appeals board, after five days of hearings, recommended that no
disciplinary action be taken and awarded Wobensmith about $50,000 to reimburse
him for his legal fees. Odom was incensed. He believed that Wobensmith was
responsible for casting the agency into the public spotlight, a rare and
unforgivable sin in NSA's secret city. He was also worried that Lawrence E.
Walsh, the Iran-contra independent prosecutor, might now have reason to turn
his attention to NSA. "You didn't hear the name of this agency come up in
the hearings," Odom once boasted. "The reason was I understood Oliver
North's ilk long before most others did. I made damn sure this place was
straight." According to one person with knowledge of the events, Odom was
also upset that Wobensmith seemed to enjoy his contacts with the
"political scene" in Washington. He told another person that the
violation of proper procedure was inexcusable and that if Wobensmith were a
soldier, he would have had him court-martialed.

As a
result, Odom reversed the panel's decision, ruled that Wobensmith should be
reprimanded, that he receive only $1,229 for legal fees, and that he be ordered
hidden behind the "green door"—away from any public contact—as
quickly as possible.

Many
NSAers were outraged, some believing that Wobensmith had been scapegoated by
the director. Wobensmith's boss, Edwin R. Lindauer, Jr., the deputy director
for information security and one of the agency's most senior officials,
protested Odom's action to the appeals board. "I personally am very
upset," he said, "when I find a person dedicated to performing his
duty has to defend himself against his own director, and pay considerable funds
to accomplish that." Lindauer went on to say that the incident was one of
the "significant factors" that drove him into retirement. "I am
totally disgusted with the management and policy of this agency," he said,
"that castigates a person such as John."

Wobensmith
didn't know what had hit him. Before the charges arising out of his failure to
get receipts from North, his supervisors had been preparing to recommend him
for a bonus. Several years earlier he had been one of four people nominated by
the agency for a Federal Career Service Award as a result of his extensive
voluntary public service—he spent between thirty and forty hours a week doing
volunteer work in his community.

After his
demotion, people turned away from him. "I was pretty much isolated,"
Wobensmith said. "I saw a lot of fences going up, a lot of doors
closing." The shunning was especially difficult to bear given the unique
hardships of working in NSA's secret city. "We deal with our families in a
very special way when we work in this place," he said. "That is, we
can't tell them what we do. I think they understand that growing up, but when
there comes a time that they know you've worked so hard, and they see this kind
of thing, they say: 'What's happening? This is a place you're dedicated so much
to. Why is [it] that, suddenly, you're in essence being abandoned?' "

Eventually,
Odom himself was basically shown the door. He was reportedly passed over for
promotion to four-star rank as a result of differences with Reagan's secretary
of defense, Frank Carlucci. At the same time, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
unanimously recommended against extending his tenure at NSA beyond the typical
three years. "It was made clear to him he was no longer welcome," one
source told Bill Gertz of the
Washington Times.
Odom had a different
take. "I've had a hell of an impact on this agency," he said.
"I've really kicked this agency into line."

Odom's
departure opened the way for the Navy to sail back to NSA. The first naval
officer to become DIRNSA since Bobby Inman, Vice Admiral William O. Studeman
seemed almost his clone—apart from the new director's likeness to Wallace
{My
Dinner with Andre)
Shawn. Like Inman, Studeman was born in Texas and, also
like Inman, he had most recently been director of Naval Intelligence. "I
think it was just fortuitous that all the stars happened to be in the right
place in the heavens," he said of getting the job. "This is clearly
the main gun of the intelligence community."

He was
sworn in as the twelfth NSA director on August 1, 1988; upon moving into his
office on the top floor of Operations Building 2B, he found a number of
problems left over from Odom's disastrous reign. "There were some morale
problems when I came here," Studeman recalled. "I got the impression
that NSA had become quite insular." Odom also tried to push on Studeman a
number of his pet projects. "He clearly wanted his thrusts to continue and
had a vested interest in his thrusts," said Studeman.

On top of
Odom's agenda was his plan to spend enormous amounts of money to make his
eavesdropping satellites "survivable" in the event of a Soviet
attack. Most senior officials at NSA thought the idea loony. "It was clear
this agency did not want to spend the money on survivability," said
Studeman. "They wanted to spend it on Sigint . . . and there was a sort of
a major effort down there to wait out General Odom or to slow-roll him on the
issues." Studeman also rejected Odom's arguments. "Early on," he
said, "I chopped all those survivability initiatives off. ... I think
General Odom had some frustrations about his ability to make decisions,"
Studeman concluded, "or talk about issues and actually have the system
respond around here."

Studeman
also found the agency widely split along cultural lines.  "This place is
cut seven ways from Sunday with cultures," he said. "You have the way
NSA itself is organized, whether it's linguists or engineers or mathematicians
or cryptologists or support people. ... Or if it's Army, Navy, Air Force, or
NSA, or whether it's research people and operators, or whatever."

When
Studeman arrived, the Cold War was still hot and the Reagan largess continued
to flow. Besides expanding its own network of listening posts around the world,
NSA began helping to beef up its partner Sigint agencies in Britain, Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand. Since the signing of the UKUSA Communications
Intelligence Agreement on March 5, 1946, the partnership had grown
continuously. By the late 1980s, there was barely a corner of the earth not
covered by a listening post belonging to one of the members, or by an American
satellite.

A key
member of the UKUSA club is Canada's diminutive but resourceful Communications
Security Establishment (CSE), which grew out of the World War II Examination
Unit. In 1946, the Canadian Department of External Affairs recommended the
creation of a new national signals intelligence organization. Thus was created
the Communications Branch of the National Research Council, with a total of 179
employees. Britain supplied many of the intercepts for the fledgling agency,
which, by 1962, had grown to about 600 staff members.

In 1975,
when the CBNRC still had about the same number of employees, a series of orders
transferred it to the Department of National Defence, where it took its present
name. Situated near the Rideau River in a suburb of Ottawa known as
Confederation Heights, CSE is headquartered in the nondescript Sir Leonard
Tilley Building, at 719 Heron Road. Five stories high and L-shaped, the brown
brick building is surrounded by a high fence and barbed wire. An underground
tunnel connects it to an annex, a windowless $35 million block of cement
designed to prevent any signals from escaping. On the roof is a silver forest
of antennas. By 1996 CSE had more than 900 employees and its budget was about
$116.8 million (Canadian) a year. Manning listening posts in various parts of
Canada are about 1,100 military intercept operators. Inside, desks are grouped
according to the regions of the world and many employees sit in front of
computer screens, their ears cupped in plastic muffs.