Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (78 page)

The SCS,
whose headship alternates between NSA and CIA officials, is an outgrowth of the
CIA's former Division D, established in the early 1950s by William F.
Friedman's first employee, Frank Rowlett. Worried about competition from the
upstart NSA, Allen Dulles hired Rowlett away to set up a mini-NSA within the
CIA. At the time, Rowlett was upset because AFSA/NSA Director Ralph Canine
wanted him to switch jobs, going from chief of Sigint to that of Comsec, the
codemaking side of the business. "As it happened," recalled fellow
pioneer Abraham Sinkov, "Rowlett was made quite unhappy by this
suggestion; he wasn't very keen about moving over to Comsec, and he transferred
to the CIA." (After about five years, Rowlett transferred back to the
NSA.)

Over the
years the mission of Division D was to assist the NSA in stealing foreign
cipher materials and recruiting foreign crypto clerks and communications
employees. After Rowlett left in the late 1950s, the division was taken over by
William Harvey, a balding, overweight, bug-eyed veteran spook. Harvey had long
been the CIA's link to NSA. In the 1950s he ran the CIA's Berlin tunnel
operation, which succeeded in secretly tapping a key East German telephone
network.

In his
work as chief of Division D, Harvey came up with a project known as ZR/RIFLE,
which was designed to locate agents who could help him steal foreign code
secrets and bribe cipher clerks. In longhand on sheets of yellow legal paper,
he outlined the joint NSA/CIA operation:

1. 
IDENTIFICATION:
THE
PURPOSE OF PROJECT ZR/RIFLE IS TO SPOT, DEVELOP, AND USE AGENT ASSETS FOR
DIVISION D OPERATIONS. AGENTS WILL BE SPOTTED IN SEVERAL AREAS, INCLUDING THE
UNITED STATES, BUT FOR OPERATIONAL SECURITY REASONS WILL PROBABLY NOT BE USED
IN THEIR COUNTRIES OF RESIDENCE. PRESENT DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITY IS BEING
CONDUCTED IN THE WE [WESTERN EUROPEAN] AND EE [EASTERN EUROPEAN] AREAS, BUT IT
IS ANTICIPATED THAT THIS WILL BE EXTENDED TO OTHER DIVISIONS ALSO. THE PROJECT
WILL BE OPERATED AGAINST THIRD-COUNTRY INSTALLATIONS AND PERSONNEL.

2.  
OBJECTIVE:
THE
OBJECTIVE OF THIS PROJECT IS THE PROCUREMENT OF CODE AND CIPHER MATERIALS AND
INFORMATION CONCERNING SUCH MATERIALS, IN ACCORDANCE WITH REQUIREMENTS LEVIED
ON THE CLANDESTINE SERVICES, PRIMARILY BY THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY. SINCE
THESE REQUIREMENTS ARE SUBJECT TO FREQUENT REVISION, NO LISTING OF TARGETS WOULD
BE VALID FOR THE DURATION OF THE PROJECT. SPECIFIC OPERATIONS WILL BE REQUESTED
ON THE BASIS OF NEED AND OPPORTUNITY. THE PROJECT WILL BE CONDUCTED BY DIVISION
D WITH ASSISTANCE FROM AREA DIVISIONS AND STATIONS AS NEEDED.

3. 
BACKGROUND:
IN RESPONSE
TO THE INCREASING REQUIREMENTS FOR THE OPERATIONAL PROCUREMENT OF FOREIGN CODES
AND CIPHER MATERIALS, DIVISION D IN 1960
BEGAN THE SPOTTING OF AGENT
ASSETS AS A DEVELOPMENTAL ACTIVITY. DURING THE SAME PERIOD REQUIREMENTS FROM
NSA BECAME MORE REFINED AND IN MANY RESPECTS MORE SENSITIVE. BECAUSE MOST
STATIONS ARE NOT EQUIPPED TO CONDUCT THIS TYPE OF OPERATION AND BECAUSE OF THE
DESIRABILITY OF COMPLETELY CENTRALIZING CONTROL OVER THIS ENTIRE EFFORT, IT WAS
DETERMINED THAT DIVISION D, WHICH IS IN CLOSEST TOUCH WITH NSA ON PROCUREMENT
REQUIREMENTS, COULD BEST CONDUCT THE ACTIVITY.

Although
ZR/RIFLE was designed to recruit "black bag" experts to break into
diplomatic facilities in order to plant bugs and photograph cryptographic
documents, in late 1960 a new mission was added. Besides engaging in burglary,
Harvey was now told, ZR/RIFLE was to act as cover for "executive
action" operations. The unit would become the home of the CIA's
assassination unit. Harvey, who carried a .45-caliber pistol wherever he went
and enjoyed tough-guy assignments, seemed the right man for the job. And the
joint NSA/CIA ZR/RIFLE project, buried deep within Division D, was the perfect
place to hide the new capability. Eventually, however, the CIA's attempted
assassinations were revealed during congressional hearings and such activities
were later banned.

Today, the
SCS is the successor to Division D. As encryption, fiber optics, the Internet,
and other new technologies make life increasingly difficult for NSA's intercept
operators and codebreakers, the SCS has greatly expanded and become
increasingly important. Its goal, like that of television's old Impossible
Missions Force, is to find unique ways around problems. "Yesterday's code
clerk is today's systems administrator," said one very senior CIA
official. The easiest way to acquire many secrets is to get into foreign
databases, and the best way to do that is to recruit—by bribery or
otherwise—the people who manage the systems. Also, by bribing someone to plant
bugs in the keyboards or other vulnerable parts of a computer network, NSA can
intercept messages before cryptographic software has a chance to scramble them.

The SCS is
headquartered in a heavily protected compound of modern buildings on
Springfield Road in Beltsville, Maryland, a few miles south of NSA. There, in
what is known as the live room, the electronic environment of target cities is
re-created in order to test which antennas and receivers would be best for
covert interception. Elsewhere, bugs, receivers, and antennas are fabricated
into everyday objects so they can be smuggled into foreign countries.
"Sometimes that's a very small antenna and you try to sneak it in,"
said former CIA director Stansfield Turner. "Sometimes the signal you're
intercepting is very small, narrow, [of] limited range, and getting your
antenna there is going to be very difficult. I mean, under Mr. Gorbachev's bed
is hard to get to, for instance."

While on
occasion NSA or SCS has compromised a nation's entire communications system by
bribing an engineer or telecommunications official, often much of the necessary
eavesdropping can be done from special rooms in U.S. embassies. But in
difficult countries, clandestine SCS agents must sometimes fly in disguised as
businesspeople. An agent might bring into the target country a parabolic
antenna disguised as an umbrella. A receiver and satellite transmitter may seem
to be a simple radio and laptop computer. The SCS official will camouflage and
plant the equipment in a remote site somewhere along the microwave's narrow
beam—maybe in a tree in a wooded area, or in the attic of a rented farmhouse.
The signals captured by the equipment will be remotely retransmitted to a
geostationary Sigint satellite, which will relay them to NSA. At other times,
no other solution is possible except climbing a telephone pole and hard-wiring
an eavesdropping device.

The SCS
will also play a key role in what is probably the most profound change in the
history of signals intelligence—the eventual switch from focusing on
information "in motion" to information "at rest." Since the
first transatlantic intercept station was erected on Gillin Farm in Houlton,
Maine, just before the close of World War I, Sigint has concentrated on
intercepting signals as they travel through the air or space. But as technology
makes that increasingly difficult and prohibitively expensive, the tendency,
say senior intelligence officials, will be to turn instead to the vast quantity
of information at rest—stored on computer databases, disks, and hard drives.
This may be done either remotely, through cyberspace, or physically, by the
SCS.

In a large
sense, the changing philosophy represents the American spy world turned full
circle, back to where the best way to get secrets is to steal them from where
they are stored. Only now the storage site may be a single hard drive
containing all the world's information.

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Beneath
the surface—past the razor wire, the bomb-sniffing dogs, the hundreds of armed
police, the SWAT teams, the barriers, and the signs with their dire
warnings—Crypto City functions, on one level, like any other town.

Although
it is not found on any map, Crypto City, if incorporated, would be one of the
largest municipalities in the state of Maryland. Each working day more than
32,000 specially cleared people—civilians, military, and contractors—travel
over its thirty-two miles of roads, which are named in honor of past NSA
notables. They park in one of the 17,000 spaces that cover 325 acres and enter
one of fifty buildings whose combined floor space totals more than seven
million square feet. In terms of growth, Crypto City is one of the most vibrant
metropolises in the country. Between 1982 and 1996 it undertook more than half
a billion dollars' worth of new construction. Another nearly $500 million was
spent leasing 1.5 million square feet of office space. And $152.8 million more
was spent for new construction in the final years leading up to the millennium.

Crypto
City's budget, long a closely held secret, has been revealed in a closed-door
meeting in the City's Engineering and Technology Building. Addressing a group
of technology employees in September 1999, Deputy Director for Services Terry
Thompson said, "Were we a corporate company based on our
four-billion-dollar budget and the number of employees that we have, we kind of
bench ourselves against Hewlett-Packard."

In fact,
NSA's overall budget for 1995-1999 totaled $17,570,600,000.
 
Another $7,304,000,000 was sought for 2000-2001. As for its
personnel, NSA employs approximately 38,000 people, more than the CIA and FBI
combined. Another 25,000 are employed in the agency's Central Security
Services, which operates the scores of listening posts; these staffers do not
count as NSA employees.

More than
37,000 cars are registered in Crypto City; its post office distributes 70,000
pieces of mail a day. Guarding and patrolling it all are the secret city's own
cops, with law enforcement authority in two states. Ranking in size among the
top 4.8 percent of the nation's 17,358 police departments, it even has its own
SWAT team. Patrolling the city, NSA police cars average 3,850 miles each month
and respond to 700 emergency calls a year.

By the
1990s Crypto City's police force had grown to over 700 uniformed officers.
Their equipment is specially designed so that they can not only react to an
emergency but also do so in total secrecy. The officers have available an
Emergency Response Communications Command Post equipped with STU-III secure
cellular telephones and encrypted closed-circuit television systems. This
technology enables the command post to communicate secretly with the city's
Emergency Management Center and its Support Services Operations Center, a
twenty-four-hour command, control, and communications center.

Should a
threat be detected, Crypto City also has its Special Operations Unit/Emergency
Reaction Team. Dressed in black paramilitary uniforms and wearing special
headgear, they brandish an assortment of weapons, including Colt 9mm submachine
guns. Attached to the team are two military medics assigned to NSA's Medical
Center. During periods of heightened alert, and at other times as a deterrent,
the team, known as the Men in Black, are posted at the perimeter gates. Another
special unit, the Executive Protection Unit, provides the drivers and
bodyguards for NSA's director and deputy director and conducts advance security
at locations where the top two officials are scheduled to appear.

As part of
NSA's increased perimeter security antiterrorism program, new fences and
barriers are being constructed around the entire metropolis. When completed,
every nonregistered vehicle will have to first be inspected for bombs and other
threats at a new $4 million screening center before being allowed to enter
Crypto City. There, a team of handlers and eleven specially trained Dutch
shepherd and Belgian Malinois bomb-sniffing dogs will closely examine every car
and truck. The canines, imported from Holland, are also used for operational
support and in emergency-response situations. They are transported throughout
the city in specially designed Jeep Cherokees equipped with a kennel, a remote
door-release system, and temperature-monitoring equipment to protect the
animals in hot weather. Currently in limited operation, the Explosive Detection
Canine Unit inspects an average of more than 750 vehicles per week.

Crypto
City's yearly consumption of electricity—409,005,840 kilowatt-hours, carried over
662 miles of wires—equals that of Maryland's capital, Annapolis. And with over
six acres of computers, twenty-five tons of air-conditioning equipment pumping
out over 6 billion cubic feet of cool air a year, and more than half a million
lightbulbs to power, the city burns up 54 million watts of electricity a day.
That leaves the secret city with a shocking monthly electric bill of nearly $2
million, which makes it the second largest user of electricity in the entire
state. In 1992 Crypto City consumed 3.5 trillion BTUs of oil, electricity, and
gas—the equivalent of 33 million gallons of fuel oil.

Despite
the enormous energy available, Crypto City still suffers blackouts, resulting
occasionally in the loss of "critical mission information," according
to an NSA document. To handle such outages, the city has its own generating
plant capable of quickly producing up to twenty-six megawatts of electricity,
enough to power a community of over 3,500 homes.

In winter,
243,000 pounds of blistering steam race through thirty-seven miles of insulated
piping every hour to keep the city warm. To satisfy its thirst, ninety-five
miles of water pipes crisscross the community, joining forty-two miles of
sewage and drain lines to keep the top secret—cleared plumbers busy. The city
is equipped with its own fire department as well as twenty-three separate alarm
systems and 402 miles of sprinklers feeding 210,000 sprinkler heads. And in
case they don't work, there are approximately 5,000 fire extinguishers in the
city. In 1998, the busy fire department responded to 168 alarms, 41 medical
assists, 44 automobile accidents, 8 natural gas investigations, and 5 brush
fires.

It is far
easier to get blood out of NSA employees than secrets. NSA is the largest
contributor to Maryland's blood donor program, donating approximately 6,500
pints of blood per year. As a result, NSA employees and their families are
eligible to receive blood whenever they need it. In fact, so many gallons of
donated blood flow out of Crypto City every day that it is used to aid victims
in terrorist incidents. Places as divergent as Oklahoma City, following the
bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, and Africa, after the
1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, have received blood from NSA's codebreakers.

For
entertainment, Crypto City offers its own movies, although none that would ever
be found in a cineplex in the world beyond the barriers. Recent films have
included
Pathfinder,
in Lapp;
My Village at Sunset,
in Khmer;
Touki
Bouki,
in Wolof, one of the languages used in the West African nation of
Mauritania; and
Wend Kuuni,
in Moore, a language used in Burkina Faso.

The city
even has an annual film festival, sponsored by the Crypto-Linguistic
Association. Entries have ranged from
This Land Is Ours,
a Nigerian
picture in the Hausa language about a corrupt businessman who tries to buy up
an entire village without revealing that precious stones are buried beneath the
land, to an Iranian black comedy,
The Suitors,
in Farsi, which deals
with a group of Iranians who sacrifice a sheep in their Manhattan apartment and
end up facing a SWAT team. Others have included
Harvest; 3000 Years,
in
Ethiopia's native Amharic;
Letters from Alou,
in Senegalese;
Children
of Nature,
in Icelandic; and
Hedd Wyn,
in Welsh. The 2000 festival
featured
A Mongolian Tale,
in Mongolian. Like a very unusual video
store, the Crypto-Linguistic Association has more than 105 films in 48 foreign
languages available for loan to city residents.

For those
interested in more conventional forms of entertainment, the city has its own
ticket agency, which, during one recent year, sold over 217,000 tickets, worth
nearly $1.8 million, to local sports, theater, and other events. Short on cash
for a ticket to the opera? The city has its own private bank, the Tower Federal
Credit Union, the second largest in the state and the twentieth largest in the
country, with over 75,000 members and $412 million in assets.

In need of
day care? Crypto City offers its own Children's World, for children aged six weeks
to five years, complete with its own kindergarten approved by the State of
Maryland. With room for 305 youngsters, it is the largest facility of its kind
in the state. Cotton swabs can be purchased in the NSA's own drugstore, where
the most popular items are candy bars. "NSA has a lot of junk food
addicts," said Maryellen Smith, standing behind the cash register.
"They eat a lot!" Not surprisingly, the second most popular item is
headache medicine.

Although
the invisible city has no docking facilities or even any waterfront, it has its
own, very exclusive yacht club, complete with commodore. Membership is
restricted to the city's security badge—carrying citizens. The clubhouse for
the Arundel Yacht Club, founded in 1967, is in Room 2S160 of the OPS 1
Building. There, in secure spaces protected from hostile eavesdroppers, the 120
members attend seminars on such topics as "Boarding Ladders—Mounting and
Storage Methods." In May 2000 members went on a moonlight cruise and had a
rendezvous in Lovely Cove, off Maryland's Chester River.

Elsewhere
in Crypto City, NSA's Bayside Big Band may be playing, while the Parkway
Chorale performs
Cats
or
Phantom of the Opera
or even Mozart's
Requiem.
On the softball diamond, Hot Flash may be pitching out Huge Batting Egos to
a cheering crowd. More than 3,200 employees participate in such intramural
sports programs. A bulletin board across from the barbershop lists the next
meeting of the Family Historians Genealogy Club: "Mexican War Records:
Adventures of the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., Battalions." For those
who enjoy a bit more stimulation, members of WIN (Women in NSA—men are allowed
to join) recently aired the daring video
Sex Hormones vs. GS Ratings.

For
pianists, there is the Klavier Club; warriors have their Battlegaming Club; and
for hedonists there is the Sun, Snow & Surf Ski Club, with trips to Austria
and Switzerland. For hams there is the Freestate Amateur Radio Club (call
letters K3IVO) which sponsors regular radio "foxhunts" where members,
using radio direction-finding equipment, attempt to track down other members
out in the wilderness who transmit brief messages on handheld radios. And for
those wishing to send a signal beyond the ionosphere, the city offers the Good
News Bible Club.

Finally,
in what would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, NSA's hidden city
even has its own Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual Employees (GLOBE) club, complete
with its own internal web address (GLOBE@nsa).
The chapter is named in honor of Alan
Turing, the bril
liant British mathematician who
played a key part in breaking the enormously complex German Enigma cipher
machine during World War II. After the war, he was declared a security risk
because of his homosexuality. After being convicted in Manchester of being a
practicing homosexual, he died of cyanide poisoning in a suspected suicide.

Every June
the city holds a weeklong "All American Festival." Open to "all
badged personnel," the gala is intended to highlight the cultural
diversity within NSA's community. "What better way to acknowledge the vast
array of similarities and differences of all Americans," said the Festival
Steering Committee. In 2000, residents of Crypto City could play "Who
Wants to Be a Millionaire?" in the Friedman Auditorium, watch some
Polynesian dancers, take salsa dance lessons, try out fencing, or listen to
Scottish bagpipe music, a gospel choir, a barbershop quartet, or the disc
jockey Wite Noyze.

Bucking
political correctness, the keynote speaker addressed the issue of "White
Men in America ... A Historical Perspective." "For many years, much
attention has been focused on the changing roles for women and minorities in
America," said the
NSA Newsletter
about the talk by Dr. Anthony J.
Ipsaro, a clinical psychologist specializing in the psychology of men.
"Ipsaro will present one of the first accounts of the status and power of
American white men in a diverse and democratic society—their contributions,
their failures, and their futures in the 21st Century."

With
eleven cafeterias and a VIP dining room, it would be difficult to go hungry in
the invisible city. The OPS 1 Building alone has a mammoth cafeteria—over
45,000 square feet, with 75 employees. It prepares 200 gallons of soup a day
and is capable of serving lunch to over 6,000 people. Designed like a food
court in a suburban mall, the Firehouse Grill serves up dogs, fries, onion
rings, and a variety of daily specials, while at the New York Deli customers
can have a sandwich made to order or prepare their own and pay by the ounce.
The city also has a Taco Bell and a Pizza Hut.