Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (5 page)

Implicit in her question was a potential recalibration of the traditional balance between liberty and security. Indeed, in September 2005, following the London Tube bombings, Manningham-Buller (now chief of MI5) advocated that “there needs to be a debate on whether some erosion of civil liberties we all value may be necessary to improve the chances of our citizens not being blown apart as they go about their daily lives.”

I realized later that (at least American) political elites were not really anxious to take on Manningham-Buller’s question. Far easier to criticize intelligence agencies for not doing enough when they feel in danger,
while reserving the right to criticize those agencies for doing too much when they feel safe again.

That’s a pity. Avoiding the hard choices creates a whipsaw effect, based on the perceptions of the moment, and ultimately costs us both freedom and security.

As close as the Five Eyes nations are, there are differences. En route home from Queenstown, I stopped in Wellington and met with Prime Minister Helen Clark. She could not have been more gracious or more supportive—mildly surprising, since she had been largely responsible in the 1980s for New Zealand’s nuclear-free policy that had strained the ANZUS alliance to near dysfunction. Now she was supportive, but with a cautious concern about the contours of American counterterrorist actions. She feared that aggressive moves on our part would erode the international norms and processes on which small nations like hers depended. No specific issues. Just discomfort. Looking back, I/we could have been more sensitive to such concerns.

We later had a more dramatic discussion with, of all people, the British. Folks in GCHQ, Britain’s NSA counterpart, were apparently conflicted (as some of the NSA workforce would be) about the wisdom of the war in Iraq. In early 2003 one of them, Katharine Gun, leaked to the London
Observer
what appeared to be an e-mail exchange between NSA and GCHQ calling for SIGINT coverage of UN delegations in the run-up to a crucial Security Council vote authorizing war. Gun referred to herself as a kind of “third culture kid,” a term that describes children raised in a culture outside their parents’ culture for a significant portion of their development years. She thought of herself far more as a citizen of the world than of Great Britain, having spent her early years living in Taiwan. Indeed, it was her Chinese-language skills that made her attractive to GCHQ.

Katharine Gun should have been a sign about changing mores in our societies. We didn’t pick up on it. It became a lot more clear a decade later with Edward Snowden.

The Gun incident was far more an irritant than a crisis, at least for us.
Even if her allegations were true, intercepting diplomatic communications to achieve a political objective was hardly novel. Britain’s use of German foreign minister Zimmermann’s telegram in 1917 to goad the United States into war comes to mind. And we could hardly condemn a foreign partner for an occasional leak, not with our own challenges in that area. (Good thing, too, since little more than a decade later, American Edward Snowden dumped a ton of GCHQ secrets into the public domain.)

But in 2004, my GCHQ counterpart David Pepper confided to me that he had moved some people off the Iraq mission because of their personal discomfort with it. He proposed a discussion of “values” at an upcoming bilateral meeting.

I think a Brit would have described me as gobsmacked at the concept that people in a SIGINT agency could opt out of missions in wartime. Admittedly we had some linguists reluctant to voice-identify targets for a kill (see chapter 4), and GCHQ was completely civilian and under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whereas NSA was 50 percent military and a combat support agency within the Department of Defense. I quickly agreed to David’s proposal, as much out of curiosity as friendship.

NSA and GCHQ senior leadership meet annually, alternating which side of the Atlantic would host. GCHQ generally finds a country estate near London and hosts us in elegance. Coming this way they are lucky to get a Motel 6 in Glen Burnie, although one year we did stay at a Sheraton adjacent to the Gettysburg battlefield, which formed a nice backdrop to our discussion. I still recall our partners’ reaction when the US Army War College docent, about to lead us along the path of Pickett’s Charge, reflected, “In the next ninety minutes here, more Americans died than would die at Normandy eighty-one years later.”

Our 2004 meeting was held at Chevening, a beautiful English country house. Benjamin Franklin had really enjoyed its charms, judging from the thank-you note he had sent his host, still on display there. We filled our day with the usual operational and technical discussions and then, after dinner, retired to the library with brandy glasses in hand for David’s requested discussion.

It was truly among friends but, on balance, we Americans spent a fair amount of time explaining ourselves. Such as explaining our views on the use of force in international relations. Differences were more stark with many Continental Europeans, of course, but we were representing a government and (I think) a people with, let’s say, a more robust view of the utility of force than even our British cousins.

One surprising aspect of the discussion was movies, specifically one movie,
High Noon
, which shows up routinely on American lists of great films. The movie’s protagonist, Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper), is one of the American Film Institute’s top five cinema heroes of all time. Although the film was little known to our partners, this classic western plays to American mythology about itself. Kane—with a murderous gang descending on him, his new Quaker wife, and the town—rejects compromise or flight, acts against the prevailing view, and in the end relies on righteous violence to survive. Not exactly contemporary European fare.

Near the end of the evening, as we were draining our brandy snifters, I summarized some cultural differences with a bit of hyperbole: “Most Americans own a gun and most Americans go to church on Sunday.”
*

It was a good evening. If any air needed clearing, we cleared it. Besides, GCHQ was having its own issues with Britain’s growing “European-ness.” The overlay of the European Convention on Human Rights onto British law, policy, and practice was a broad issue for the government. For GCHQ it meant additional administrative burdens and procedures to be able to demonstrate compliance.

The Australians suffer from no such European overhang. I once volunteered to Prime Minister Rudd that this was the most comfortable intelligence relationship we had, bar none. I don’t know if that devolved out
of parallel immigrant histories, similar frontier experiences, or common pragmatic cultures. Whatever it was, it worked. The Australians were good, and although their services were small, they had more than enough critical mass to be well worth our time.

Through a careful division of labor, NSA relied on reporting from DSD (Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate) for certain areas of the world. We even bent NSA collection pipes on some overseas regions to Canberra, to be worked there, and although the possibility of sweeping up US person communications wasn’t quite zero, we had full confidence that DSD analysts would respect the US person privacy protections on which we had trained them. It’s hard to have more confidence in a partner than the proposition “If he screws up, I go to jail.” (In October 2014 the Australian ambassador hosted a reception commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of Canberra’s relationship with CIA. Not every country commemorates that sort of thing.)

We had other trusting relationships. One of our Northern European partners once inadvertently intercepted an American government fax that revealed sensitive details about presidential travel. The partner had enough confidence in the relationship (that we would not assume that they were intentionally targeting us), that they actually showed the fax to us, warning that if they were able to intercept it, others could too. We thanked them and alerted the Secret Service. That’s a pretty good friend.

We were a good friend too. We helped a European ally when several of its citizens were taken hostage in North Africa. We worked hard at it. In the end they said that we acted like the hostages were Americans.

I thought that we could do more. One of my predecessors had organized key NATO countries in a more cooperative SIGINT relationship targeting the Soviets. Although the Soviets were long gone, the construct—called SIGINT Seniors—continued. Meetings were held annually rotating among the members, and with each trying to outdo the other in hospitality, they were always delightful. Progress on operational matters, however, was glacial or, as one perceptive wag observed, it was measured in what he called “NATO time units.”

The director of NSA was permanent chair of this group, and although it wasn’t our turn to host, I called an out-of-cycle meeting in early December 2001. We would host it, not in the United States because of security and travel burdens, but at an installation in Europe that NSA used for logistics and technical support. It would be on European soil and the Europeans were fully supportive. The British were not the only services that had quietly slipped into the United States after the attacks to offer help.

There was no ceremony, fine food, or wine at this particular session. We were candid and tactical and operational to an unprecedented degree. It was pretty much our transmitting what we were doing. We told our friends the details of terrorist-related communications we had discovered entering or leaving their countries. Let me repeat this, in light of the furor over Edward Snowden’s later revelations: we were telling our European friends what numbers in
their
countries were in contact with numbers we believed were associated with terrorism. Their response in 2001 was to take notes.

We covered our collection posture—where we thought we were strong and where we needed help. We didn’t have to convince them to put their shoulder to this wheel. Of course, they would all have to do this consistent with their laws and their own political guidance, but we got the result we wanted: everyone was ready to help.

Over time in Afghanistan we developed something called Center Ice, an American initiative to tie these SIGINT partners into a single tactical network. Our investment wasn’t much more than laptops and secure communications, but it allowed us to coordinate and de-conflict collection across national units.

We also didn’t hesitate to be creative about our choice of partners. Even before 9/11 we approached some Central Asian states for cooperative relationships. The Soviet Union’s old site at Termez in Uzbekistan looked right down the throat at Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. Even with parts of the site still tied into the Russian SIGINT system, geography mattered.

Beyond SIGINT, NATO took a dramatic if largely symbolic step in the fall of 2001. The alliance invoked Article 5, which states that an attack against one is an attack against all, and deployed NATO AWACS (an airborne command and control platform) to North America for this continent’s defense. I had spent thirty years thinking about how to move military power in the other direction, and the first real-world example of common defense was Europe coming to our aid. Strange feeling.

 • • • 

O
F COURSE,
at NSA we also had to tend to our own defense. The agency has always had people in harm’s way. SIGINT aircraft have been shot down by the Soviet Union and North Korea in the past, and the Israeli Air Force strafed a SIGINT ship in 1967. But we had always figured that being in garrison, like being at Fort Meade or some other field station, was also being in sanctuary. The 9/11 attack showed that this was no longer true.

The traffic jam generated by my order to evacuate nonessential personnel on 9/11 showed very clearly that we were not prepared to defend in place. And too many of our buildings were too close to public lands and highways.

Many of our people sensed that. I know that their families did. I tried to allay some of the concern with a letter we sent home with all of our employees. “Please be assured,” I wrote, “that . . . every effort is being made to ensure the safety of our employees. We will protect ourselves—but, most importantly, we will protect the nation.”

Fortunately, we had a program called PSAT (perimeter security anti-terrorism) already under way, so we accelerated that. We were moving to treat NSA as a secure campus (like CIA), rather than isolated buildings each approachable via public roads. Now, in addition, large boulders were placed all around our perimeter so that vehicle-borne explosives could not get close to our structures. We enlisted local reserve units to intimidate would-be attackers with the visibly threatening presence of armored personnel carriers, weapons mounted, at our vehicle entrances. Our
youngest son was courting his now wife at that time, and one of her first introductions to the family was going through such a checkpoint to get to our quarters.

The state of Maryland worked very hard to protect us, particularly our buildings near Route 50, which they eventually rerouted. We also pumped up CONFIRM, the system that recorded the badge swipes of people entering and leaving our facilities. Now such data would be kept off-site. In the event of catastrophic destruction, we could at least determine who was and was not in our buildings.

But this had to be about more than protecting our physical plant or even our personnel. We also had to protect our digital infrastructure and our intellectual property. What would the nation do if we lost our computer complex or our source code to a determined attacker?

We never wanted to have to answer that question, so we set out to build an alternative facility where much of this would be preserved. We got a boost from Congressman David Obey from Wisconsin, who earmarked money to preserve our supercomputing capacity. It was no accident that the congressman was from Wisconsin, where our Cray computers were built. It was still a very good idea. But we also knew that preserving our supercomputing capacity was not enough. We had to preserve our assets from end to end. The challenge was how to duplicate NSA. Quickly.