Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (69 page)

In short,
the time was ripe to begin quietly turning America's big ear on Airbus and
other tough foreign competitors, and had the decision been made, NSA would have
begun complying. The issue for the agency was not ethics but mechanics,
according to Studeman.

"If
economic intelligence and economic competition are defined as a national
security interest, the intelligence community is essentially going to have to
spread its resources across a lot more of the problem, and the problem is still
very big," he said. "When you take all the geographic distribution
possibilities and add on top of it the military, political/diplomatic,
economic, sociological, ecological, and every other kind of area we're being
asked to look at now . . . it's a new world and it's possible we could be
caught short and have some cold starts." He added, "The real issue
for us is whether or not we can find a way to, number one, successfully collect
that intelligence, which is a nontrivial achievement in and of itself, if it
were ever directed. And secondly, how do we use it? ... There isn't any use to
collecting it if it cannot be used."

For years
NSA had collected economic intelligence, but the agency had not specifically
eavesdropped on particular companies for the purpose of industrial espionage.
"Right now what broad information NSA collects on trade and that sort of
thing in the world," said Studeman, "we provide to federal agencies
whether it's Commerce or Treasury or the State Department. We provide that
information directly and they are a federal consumer."

Rather
than supply direct competitive intelligence to American business, NSA was
directed to increase support for the business community—and the American
economy—in more indirect ways. One means was to beef up efforts to discover
illegal and deceptive tactics, such as bribery, used by foreign competitors to
win contracts away from American companies. The other was to devote more
resources to providing intelligence to U.S. government negotiators during
important trade talks.

NSA had
long played a "defensive" role in helping to prevent foreign
countries from spying on American companies. "What we use the intelligence
instrument for is collecting against other people who are collecting against us
for industrial espionage purposes," said Studeman, "or to collect
against other people who are not playing by internationally accepted rules of
the road or business ethics." But in 1990 the question being debated in
the Bush White House and at CIA was whether the NSA would begin going on the
"offensive." "We will be definitely helping out on the defensive
side," said Studeman. "But the school's out on the offensive."

In one
"defensive" case, the CIA obtained details of an offer by French
business executives to allegedly bribe Brazilian officials to steer a $1.4
billion contract toward Thomson-CSF and away from the Raytheon Corporation.
Raytheon later won the contract. In 1995, a report presented to Congress cited
"almost one hundred cases of foreign firms using bribery to undercut U.S.
firms' efforts to win international contracts with about $45 billion." It
added, "The foreign firms that offer bribes typically win about eighty
percent of the deals."

"If
we had any certain evidence," said Studeman, "that someone was
essentially targeting an American company, the [intelligence] community would
essentially go to that company and actively inform them they are being targeted
and also might provide them some kind of advice on how to enhance their
security or at least make recommendations about how technically . . . [to]
reduce their vulnerability."

Former CIA
director R. James Woolsey was far more blunt about NSA's eavesdropping on
European companies to detect crooked tactics. "Yes, my continental
European friends, we have spied on you," he said.

And it's
true that we use computers to sort through data by using keywords. . . . That's
right, my continental friends, we have spied on you because you bribe. Your
companies' products are often more costly, less technically advanced, or both,
than your American competitors'. As a result you bribe a lot. So complicit are
your governments that in several European countries bribes still are
tax-deductible.

When we
have caught you at it, you might be interested [to know], we haven't said a
word to the U.S. companies in the competition. Instead we go to the government
you're bribing and tell its officials that we don't take kindly to such
corruption. They often respond by giving the most meritorious bid (sometimes
American, sometimes not) all or part of the contract. This upsets you, and
sometimes creates recriminations between your bribers and the other country's
bribees, and this occasionally becomes a public scandal. We love it.

As
mentioned earlier, during the 1990s NSA also became more aggressive in
providing intelligence during key international trade conferences. Fifty years
ago to the day after NSA's predecessor the Signal Security Agency eavesdropped
on the San Francisco conference that led to the United Nations, American
signals intelligence specialists were preparing to bug another conference. This
time, in June 1995, the participants were the United States and Japan, and the
subject Japanese luxury car imports to the United States. As before, American
negotiators tried to have the conference entirely on U.S. soil, where
eavesdropping would be much easier: the Japanese wanted to meet on their own
home turf. But a compromise was reached: the talks were to be held partly in
Geneva, Switzerland, and partly in Washington.

The
dispute was over a $5.9 million punitive tariff on fourteen Japanese luxury
cars, scheduled to take effect on June 28. On Sunday night, June 25, U.S. Trade
Representative Mickey Kantor arrived in Geneva for the start of the latest
round of talks aimed at averting the rapidly approaching deadline. The next
morning, at the Intercontinental Hotel near Lake Geneva, in the shadow of the
Swiss Alps, Kantor held a press conference. President Clinton, he said,
"has directed me to come here and make our best efforts to see if there is
any way to open Japanese markets and expand trade as we have been trying to
do."

To help
Kantor's negotiating team make those "best efforts," an NSA team had
been flown in weeks earlier and was housed nearby. They were there to supply
the team with intercepted conversations among auto executives from Toyota and
Nissan, who were pressuring their government for a settlement. Fortunately for
the eavesdroppers, the Japanese negotiators frequently bypassed secure,
encrypted phones because insecure hotel telephones were more readily available
and easier to use.

But while
NSA looks for bribery and eavesdrops on trade missions, there is no evidence
that it is a handmaiden to corporate America. Nor, apparently, does GCHQ engage
in industrial espionage. In 1984 Jock Kane, a former supervisory intercept
operator with thirty years' experience at GCHQ, wrote a blistering manuscript
accusing the agency of mismanagement and sloppy security. Before it was
published, however, the manuscript was seized by the British government under
the Official Secrets Act and never saw the light of day. Publication, said the
order, "would be a breach of duty of confidentiality owed to the Crown, and
contrary to the provisions of the Official Secrets Act."

In a copy
of the manuscript obtained by the author before the seizure, Kane discusses
what is clearly the Echelon system, although he does not use the codename. Of
industrial espionage, he points out:

Much of
the targeting is ILC—International Licensed Carriers. . . . Thousands of
messages are processed every week from these links, on every possible subject,
from diplomacy to business, oil supplies, crop failures in any part of the
world, down to ordinary domestic telegrams.

From these
intercepts pours a wealth of industrial intelligence information into the
memory cells of GCHQ's vast computer complex, information that would have been
a tremendous asset to British industrialists, but British industry has never
had access to this information because GCHQ chiefs, not the Cabinet, took the
decision that British industry, which to a large extent finances this vast
bureaucracy, should not be one of their "customers."

The issue
for Europe is not whether UKUSA's Echelon system is stealing trade secrets from
foreign businesses and passing them on to competitors; it is not. The real
issue is far more important: it is whether Echelon is doing away with
individual privacy—a basic human right. Disembodied snippets of conversations
are snatched from the ether, perhaps out of context, and may be misinterpreted
by an analyst who then secretly transmits them to spy agencies and law
enforcement offices around the world.

The
misleading information is then placed in NSA's near-bottomless computer storage
system, a system capable of storing 5
trillion
pages of text, a stack of
paper 150 miles high. Unlike information on U.S. persons, which cannot be kept
longer than a year, information on foreign citizens can be held eternally. As
permanent as India ink, the mark may remain with the person forever. He will
never be told how he was placed on a customs blacklist, who put him there, why
he lost a contract—or worse.

One
snippet of NSA or CIA information concerned an Egyptian immigrant, Nasser
Ahmed, who was seeking asylum in the United States. The secret information led
to his arrest; he was denied bail and held for more than three years in
solitary confinement pending his deportation. Despite years of efforts by his
attorney, Abdeen Jabara, once a subject of illegal NSA surveillance himself, he
was never told what the "secret evidence" consisted of, where it came
from, or how the United States obtained it. In this Kafkaesque world, he could
not fight the charges because he was not told what they were: they were secret.
It was only after considerable pressure from the Arab-American community that
the Justice Department finally ordered some of the information released. Ahmed
was then able to successfully challenge it and win his freedom. "With a
better understanding of the government's case," wrote the judge in August
1999, the secret evidence "can no longer be viewed as sufficiently
reliable to support a
finding that [Mr. Ahmed] is a danger." At the
time, more than two dozen other people around the country were being held on
such "secret evidence." A few months later, another federal judge
ruled that to hold someone, whether or not a U.S. citizen, on the basis of
"secret evidence" was unconstitutional.

Unchecked,
UKUSA's worldwide eavesdropping network could become a sort of cyber secret
police, without courts, juries, or the right to a defense.

Whether
NSA spies on American citizens has long been a troubling question. Its past
record is shameful, not only for what the agency did but for how it went about
it. In the late 1960s NSA was an agency unrestrained by laws or legislative
charter and led by a man obsessed with secrecy and power. By then Louis
Tordella had been deputy director for a decade, during which he had taken the
agency from a sleepy backwater to the largest and most secret intelligence
organization in American history. Never before or since has any one person held
so much power for so long in America's spy world. But where most top officials are
drawn to public recognition like moths to streetlights, Tordella was drawn to
the darkness. So dark was Tordella's world that he became lost in it, unable
anymore to recognize the boundary lines between U.S. citizens and foreign
enemies and between a government of open laws and one of secret tyranny. All
ears and no eyes, Tordella was leading his agency and his country toward a deep
abyss.

Thus in
the fall of 1967, when the U.S. Army began requesting intercepts on American
citizens and groups, the agency blindly complied.  At the time, the military
was worried about a massive "March on the Pentagon," organized to
protest the war in Vietnam. Army officials compiled a list of protesters and
asked NSA to put their names on its watch lists. Over the following months,
other agencies, including the CIA, FBI, and DIA, followed suit. The folksinger
Joan Baez was considered a threat and placed on the list, as were the
well-known pediatrician Benjamin Spock, the actress Jane Fonda, and Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. Like weeds in an untended lot, the lists multiplied as more
and more people were added and as people who had dealings with the targets
became targets themselves.

The
domestic watch list program took on added importance on July 1, 1969, when it
was granted its own charter and codeword: Minaret. "MINARET information
specifically includes communications concerning individuals or
organizations," it said, "involved in civil disturbances, antiwar
movements/demonstrations and Military deserters involved in the antiwar
movements." An equally important aspect of Minaret was keeping NSA's
fingerprints off the illegal operation. "Although MINARET will be handled
as Sigint and distributed to Sigint recipients, it will not," said the
charter, "be identified with the National Security Agency."

Frank
Raven, in charge of G Group, which focused on the non-Communist world, was
upset by the sudden switch to domestic eavesdropping but could do little about
it. At one point, after being given the name of a U.S. citizen to target, he
protested. "I tried to object to that on constitutional grounds as to
whether or not it was legal—as to whether or not we should do it," he
said, "and I was told at that time that you couldn't argue with it—it came
from the highest level." Some of the targets, he said, were downright
"asinine." "When J. Edgar Hoover gives you a requirement for
complete surveillance of all Quakers in the United States," recalled
Raven, "when Richard M. Nixon is a Quaker and he's the president of the
United States, it gets pretty funny." Hoover apparently believed that the
religious group was shipping food and supplies to Southeast Asia.