Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (81 page)

In
addition to his own armed forces, Hayden also has his own
"ambassadors," Special U.S. Liaison Officers (SUSLOs), who represent
NSA in various parts of the world. The job of SUSLO London is so choice that it
frequently serves as a preretirement posting for NSA's deputy directors. Thus
it was no surprise when Hayden's first deputy, Barbara McNamara, decided to
spend her final NSA days sipping tea and shopping at Harrods. Other SUSLOs are
located in Ottawa, Canada; Canberra, Australia; and Wellington, New Zealand.
Hayden also has senior representatives to the major military commands. Based in
Hawaii, the chief, NSA/CSS Pacific, serves as the top cryptologic liaison with
the commander of American forces in the Pacific and the chief, NSA/CSS Europe,
has similar responsibilities with respect to the top U.S. commander in that
region. Finally, other officials, known as NSA/CSS representatives, are posted
in a variety of countries and with other agencies, such as the Pentagon and the
State Department.

Other
residents of the eighth floor include the agency's chief scientist,
mathematician George R. Cotter. He is responsible for keeping NSA abreast of
fast-changing technologies in the outside world. Another is Robert L. Deitz,
NSA's general counsel, who manages the agency's forty-five lawyers. For two
decades, NSA has picked its top attorney, who usually serves for about three
years, from private practice. Deitz was formerly a product liability lawyer.

Down the
hall from Robert Deitz is Rear Admiral Joseph D. Burns, the chief of staff.
Among other things, his office helps formulate the top secret United States
Signals Intelligence Directives (USSIDs), which govern NSA's worldwide
eavesdropping operations. The USSIDs tell eavesdroppers
what
to do;
Technical Instructions (Techins) are then issued to explain
how
to do
it. The office also deals with the agency's legislative, contracting, and
budget issues.

Past the
Russian Technical Library, through a breezeway decorated with an American flag
made up of photographs of NSA personnel, and one is in OPS 1, the original
A-shaped building built in the 1950s. Today, as then, it is the principal home
of the Directorate of Operations (DO). First among equals, the DO constitutes
the agency's largest single division. With its legions of eavesdroppers,
codebreakers, linguists, and traffic and signals analysts, it encompasses the
entire spectrum of signals intelligence, from intercept to cryptanalysis,
high-level diplomatic systems to low-level radiotelephone chatter, analysis of
cleartext to analysis of metadata—information about information. Its brief
covers the analysis of cipher systems belonging to friend as well as foe,
democracies as well as dictatorships, microcountries as well as giants. It is
the Black Chamber's Black Chamber.

Behind the
door to Room 2W106—once the director's office before OPS 2B was built—is James
R. (Rich) Taylor, the deputy director for operations. Formerly the agency's
executive director, Taylor began his civilian career at NSA in 1974, having
graduated from the Air Force Academy and spent five years as an officer with
the NSA's air arm, the Air Force Security Service. During the 1990s he became
one of the agency's top weapons experts. He also served as director of the
RAMPART National Program Office, a big-budget and highly secret joint
intelligence community activity "pursuing an area of major investment for
future U.S. intelligence operations."

"Operations,"
Taylor says, "encompasses all the activities that enable analysts to
provide intelligence to meet customer requirements. Many agency personnel, in
different jobs, have a stake in ensuring that Sigint continues to be America's
most valued source of intelligence." Essential, he says, is a close
relationship between those who collect the information and those who build the
ultra-advanced systems that make the collection possible. "The key to our
success is a strong dynamic partnership between DT [the Directorate of
Technology and Systems] and DO."

Taylor's
deputy is Air Force Major General Tiiu Kera, a stocky woman with reddish hair.
A native of Germany, she was born in Balingen/Württemberg at the end of World
War II. In 1969, during the height of the antiwar period, Kera received a
master's degree in political science from Indiana University. Four years later
she was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Air Force. During much of her
career she held a number of routine assignments as a personnel officer, mostly
within the United States. But in 1987 her career got a boost when she was sent
to the National War College for nine months. Kera spent the Gulf War not making
policy in the Pentagon or directing air missions over Baghdad but hanging out
in Harvard Square as a student, this time at Harvard's Center for International
Affairs. After her tour in Cambridge, she became the first U.S. defense attaché
to Lithuania and later was named director of intelligence for the U.S.
Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska.

Because of
the growing closeness between NSA and CIA—especially through the joint Special
Collection Service, which uses clandestine personnel and techniques to assist
NSA—one of Taylor's top deputies always comes from the CIA.

For nearly
forty years the DO was organized along geographic lines. The codebreakers of A
Group focused on the Soviet Union, while those of B Group analyzed the
communications of Communist Asia and G Group tackled the cipher systems of all
other areas. But when the Cold War ended, so did the preoccupation with
borders. The new non-traditional threats—terrorism, nuclear weapons
proliferation, and drugs—have no borders.

Thus, in
1997 the old geographically based groups were replaced with two new
organizations. W Group, the Office of Global Issues and Weapons Systems, was
formed to focus the agency's powerful eavesdropping platforms on these new
transnational adversaries, irrespective of geography. The other, M Group, the
Office of Geopolitical and Military Production, would concentrate on the cyber
infrastructure of potential adversaries, looking, for example, for
vulnerabilities in their telecommunications systems.

Chief of M
Group in 2000 was Jeanne Y. Zimmer, who was awarded the Pentagon's
Distinguished Civilian Service Award for her "leadership and management of
a newly formed organization with worldwide responsibilities [that] had a
lasting impact for the United States." The NSA's organizational changes,
said former NSA director Minihan, "lets you think in a more agile and
dynamic way. Now you are not looking at airplanes, tanks, ships, and soldiers.
You are looking at the infrastructure within which the operating capability of
the adversary exists."

Room 3E099
of OPS 1 is the home of the National Security Operations Center, the very heart
of NSA's worldwide eavesdropping activities. Located on the building's third
floor, the NSOC (pronounced "N-sock") is reached through a set of
automatic glass doors. Above are the seals of the three organizations that make
up the NSA's own military, the Central Security Service, and below, inlaid in
the flooring, are the Center's initials.

Inside is
a quiet, windowless, war room—like command center, staffed around the clock by
five rotating teams of civilian and military personnel. Waist-high cubicles
separate target areas, such as terrorism and transnational threats; large video
screens cover the walls; and computer monitors glow like electronic candles in
the dim light. On the top of the wall, clocks tick off time in various
places—Bosnia, Moscow, Iraq. If an uncleared visitor enters, red warning lights
begin to whirl. The NSOC directs critical and time-sensitive signals
intelligence and information security operations. When it was established in
1972, the NSOC was known as the National Sigint Operations Center. The name was
changed in 1996 when the NSOC also became the center for the information
security side of the agency, responsible for developing cipher machines and
assisting in protecting the nation against cyber attacks. Its director in 2000
was Colonel Joe Brand. Reporting to him is the senior operation officer (SOO),
the NSA duty officer. If a listening post suddenly picks up an indication of a
far-off assassination, or a sudden attack by Russia on a neighboring republic,
a CRITIC message containing that information will be flashed immediately to the
NSOC. Shortly after the USS
Cole
was attacked by terrorists in the port
of Aden in October 2000, a CRITIC was zapped to the NSOC. Within minutes of the
early morning message, a call was placed to the director, Michael Hayden.

Elsewhere
in the NSOC, information security specialists monitor critical networks for
indications of threats and intrusions. During a crisis, senior officials meet
in the nearby conference room, where they sit around a highly polished,
wedge-shaped conference table with a secure conference speakerphone in the
center.

Just down
the hallway, in Room 3E132, is Special Support Activity, which provides
sensitive assistance to military commanders and federal executives around the
world. Units known as Cryptologic Service Groups (CSGs) bring the NSA, in
microcosm, to the national security community and forces in the field. Among the
more than thirty CSGs is one assigned to the U.S. Operations Command at MacDill
Air Force Base in Tampa. Another is at the State Department in Washington.
There, the CSGs are most useful when they can provide diplomats with intercepts
containing details of their opponents' positions during important negotiations.

Further
down the hallway in OPS 1 is NSA's Worldwide Video Teleconferencing Center,
which allows headquarters employees to conduct highly secret meetings with
their counterparts at various listening posts around the world or with
officials from NSA's foreign partners, such as Britain's GCHQ. The Center
conducts about 200 conferences a month. It consists of a large conference room,
with space for twenty-five participants, and a wall of television monitors.
This allows the faraway participants to be seen and heard simultaneously. Data
can also be exchanged, by computer and fax. All communication to and from the
teleconferencing center is heavily encrypted and highly secure.

Among the
most secret organizations in OPS 1 is the Defense Special Missile and
Astronautics Center (DEFSMAC). At the entrance to Room 1E069 is the
organization's seal: an orbiting satellite and a patch of stars above the
earth. Even within the intelligence community, DEFSMAC (pronounced
"deaf-smack"), a joint project of the NSA and the DIA, remains little
known.

Robert
McNamara established the organization on April 27, 1964, largely as a result of
the Cuban missile crisis, in order to evaluate foreign missile activity and
threats. "You didn't want NORAD [the North American Air Defense Command]
fooling around in technologies that they didn't understand, or trying to
evaluate a bunch of raw data, so DEFSMAC was put in," said Lieutenant
General Daniel O. Graham, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Since its beginning, the organization has always been headed by an NSA
civilian, with a DIA colonel as deputy director.

Today the
organization operates as the nation's chief warning bell for the launch of
foreign rockets—whether in ballistic missile tests by China or North Korea, or
in an attack from a rogue launch site in Russia. The focal point for "all
source" intelligence—listening posts, early warning satellites, human
agents, seismic detectors—on missile launches, DEFSMAC provides the
"initial analysis and reporting on all foreign space and missile
events."

As other
organizations have shrunk with the end of the Cold War, DEFSMAC has more than
doubled its size, to more than 230 people, eighty-five of whom staff a new operations
center. Where once DEFSMAC had only Russia and China to monitor, its widely
dispersed targets now also include India, North Korea, Iran, Israel, and
Pakistan.

DEFSMAC
watches the earth as a physician listens to a heart, hoping to detect the first
irregular beat indicating that a missile is about to be launched. "It has
all the inputs from all the assets, and is a warning activity," explained
one former NSA official. "They probably have a better feel for any
worldwide threat to this country from missiles, aircraft, or overt military
activities, better and more timely, at instant fingertip availability, than any
group in the United States." According to another former NSA official,
"DEFSMAC not only detects them but . . . [also has] the capability to relatively
immediately determine what kind of a vehicle was launched, what trajectory it's
on, and based on all these parameters they can say either it's a threat or it's
not a threat." A recent director of DEFSMAC, Chary Izquierdo, referred to
her organization as "the [nation's] premier missile and space intelligence
producer."

Once
DEFSMAC receives a tip-off, an indication that a launch is soon to take place
somewhere in the world, a complex chain of events is set in motion. For
example, in October 1998 NSA satellites and listening posts, such as those in
Germany, picked up indications that Russia was about to test a new missile from
its launch site in Plesetsk, in the country's far northwest. Electronic
signatures intercepted from Russian instruments being prepared to measure the
rocket's telemetry gave one of the first clues that the missile was a Topol-M
single-warhead intercontinental ballistic missile. Signals intelligence
satellites also likely picked up phone conversations between the launch site
and Moscow.

Upon
receiving such indicators, DEFSMAC officials would immediately have sent out
near-real-time and in-depth, all-source intelligence alerts to almost 200
"customers," including the White House Situation Room, the National
Military Command Center at the Pentagon, the DIA Alert Center, and all
listening posts in the area of the launch site. At the same time, elsewhere
within DEFSMAC, analysts would have closely monitored all intercepts flooding
in from the area; examined the latest overhead photography; and analyzed data
from an early-warning satellite 22,300 miles above the equator. This satellite
would have been first to spot the missile's rocket plume and signal back to
earth that a launch had occurred.