Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (7 page)

On the civilian side, in the four years after 9/11, we were able to hire about five hundred new linguists. We raised their pay too. A lot. Several times.

Some of the new hires were native-born in target languages and, since they were young, pretty tech savvy too. Others were older, desperate to serve, but they made it quite clear that they would never master the technical intricacies of the SIGINT system. They did make superb quality controllers on our translations.

There were special emotional strains in this line of work. Language analysts stay on a target for a long time and sometimes know their target better than they know their own families. They become part of the virtual life of the target. It can be a real emotional roller coaster. When a target has been designated for direct action and his death needs to be confirmed, it is often the same phone that is targeted, but now the communications comprise sobbing, grieving family members.

Some analysts have had real issues with confirming the identity of a communicant prior to direct action. Some just can’t do it. This is conscientious objection to killing or at least to being a direct part of the killing, not a political view on the cause or conduct of a war. One senior recounted to me one of his linguists spontaneously beginning to cry as she was in the car with him. He asked what was wrong. She said, “Something at work,” and when they got to the office, she explained the emotional stress of targeted killings.

Special people. And rare. One day I was returning from a meeting at Langley and my security detail looked a little impatient, as they had to wait for a stream of pedestrian traffic flowing outward from the NSA headquarters building. As they inched the SUV forward, I only half in jest cautioned, “Be careful. They could be linguists.”

Before the Iraq war started, I wanted to talk to the entire workforce. The congressional vote on authorizing the invasion promised to be close, and I had every reason to believe that the workforce split along similar lines. I usually gave an important briefing once in the agency’s Friedman Auditorium and then had it repeated and beamed electronically to workstations at Fort Meade and beyond.

Not this time. Too important. I wanted a personal touch. I gave the briefing to multiple audiences (clearly not to all 35,000 military and civilian workers, but you get the point) at Fort Meade and up near the Baltimore-Washington airport, where we had a large annex. Because we had folks working with Central Command in Tampa and in the combat theater, we knew CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks’s concept of operations—“shock and awe”—and the broad outline of his war plan.

I walked the workforce through our responsibilities, how our emphasis would shift as the assault force went through its phases:

Phase 1. Deployment.

Phase 2. Shaping the battle space.

Phase 3. Major force-on-force action.

Phase 4. Post-conflict stability operations.

Knowing the political divisions in this country and the upcoming Senate debate, I acknowledged that there were surely some in the audience who opposed the coming conflict. So I reminded them of our duties as professionals, that if the republic authorized war, we would fight it savagely, limited only by the laws of armed conflict. I then added, “We could all agree that it would be a bad thing indeed if countries around
the world got the idea that it was OK to be an enemy of the United States of America.”

I was asked in several meetings how long all this was going to take. Don Rumsfeld had gotten the same question while visiting the US air base at Aviano, Italy. He said, “It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”

I had a little different answer. I said that the part that the American people would call war, phase 3, would be measured in weeks, not months. I then added that phase 4, post-conflict stability operations, would not be measured in months either. I got the WMD wrong, but I certainly nailed that one.

Even before Franks ordered his forces to cross the line of departure, NSA was already deeply in the fight, so some at the agency were surprised at my reaction to the traditional signs that NSA used at moments like this: “We support the warfighter.”

“Don’t say that,” I said. “We’re not support. We’re part of the fight. We’re responsible for final outcomes, not just our inputs.”

I had concluded that we had to go forward with combat formations. When you are there, you are in the fight. When you are not, you are in the in-box, and no one reads their in-box when they are in a fight.

The major muscle movement before us was transitioning from being a SIGINT production factory to an intelligence consultancy. We couldn’t just mail it in and merely sustain the old transactional relationship of delivering SIGINT products. We needed a living, breathing operational intimacy with people we used to call customers. We had to ramp up the forward deployment of our knowledge, skills, and abilities. One senior summarized it as sending our carbon units rather than our silicon units into the fray.

I thought that we were doing well enough until, after the war was under way, our chief of research, the one from Walt Disney Imagineering, took an extended trip through the theater. He reported that the new approach was working, to a point. “They love us at MNF-I [Multi-National
Force–Iraq] and corps headquarters. We’re OK at division level, but below that they barely know who we are.” As director of the
National
Security Agency, doctrinally I was charged with supporting the national leadership and Department of Defense echelons down to about the corps level. But doctrine wasn’t working. Lower-echelon units weren’t feeling the love (or getting and acting on valuable SIGINT).

We reached further down-echelon and embedded five-person NSA teams at the division level and linked regiments (in the Marine Corps) and brigades (in the army) to the highly classified NSANet. Once we trained them and cleared them for very sensitive information, low-echelon GIs were getting access to precious national databases, all the while being advised by high-end NSA professionals.

In one telling vignette, an NSA analyst at Fort Meade reported that he had “received a secure call from a master gunnery sergeant in the front line. He needed to know what kind of switching equipment was used in An Nasiriyah’s central switch. Seems they were planning an operation against it and were interested in exploiting the switch, if they could get control of it. Fortunately, NSA had that information—it was an Alcatel E-10. I had a mental image of him sitting in the back of an armored vehicle, using a laptop to link into NSANet.”

When we really got going, front-line SIGINT soldiers and marines were tuning orbiting satellites to home in on targets to their immediate front, while folks under my direct control at Fort Meade and Fort Gordon in Georgia were tuning antennas on tactical vehicles in the forward line of march.

To keep all of this synchronized, we held routine videoconferences every other day for all the relevant SIGINT units inside and outside the theater. My conference room screen would have a dozen or more locations beamed in as we shared information, assigned tasks, and de-conflicted operations. The playbook was “coherent centralized planning [with] decentralized execution; a networked information sharing enterprise; [leveraging] an unprecedented level of collaboration.”

To be clear, we weren’t trying to play Tom Sawyer in order to get a lot
of other people to whitewash our fence. In fact, it was more the opposite. We welcomed more help but had to be careful whom we trusted with a brush.

Even though making SIGINT is hard work, a lot of people think they can do it. When customers think they’re not getting enough of NSA’s attention—or when they are, but the reporting is not what they want to hear—the agency sometimes gets a request for the “raw data.” The request usually betrays a real lack of understanding of how this works.

“How raw do you want it? Before we process it, when it’s still unintelligible beeps and squeaks?”

“No. No. After processing.”

“Sure.”

“But this is all in Urdu or Pashto or something.”

“Yes, I know.”

“But I need it in English.”

“We don’t translate and store everything in English. Just the important stuff.”

“Yeah. Give me that stuff.”

“But that’s what you have been getting. We call it reporting.”

On the rare occasion when we turned a raw SIGINT pipeline on, we usually received a request within hours to turn it off. Too much stuff.

We were being theologically correct (and consistent with our charter) to keep what we called the SIGINT production chain under our control. But we were truly dealing with a ton of material, and we could never be totally sure that we completely (or currently) understood our teammates’ requirements. And frankly, people everywhere were now participating in processes that had always served them, but from which they had previously been personally barred, from teller machines to booking airline tickets to publishing books.

We needed to square this circle, and we hit upon the concept of the SIGINT production stream, our routine reporting at the mouth of our waterway and raw unprocessed traffic at the headwaters. We would allow people and organizations previously known as customers to swim
upstream as long as they could protect the data they encountered and as long as they could add value to it. Those two caveats weeded out the casual request and the ill-considered demand.

The further upstream someone wanted to go, the heavier the requirement. “Protecting the data” meant secure spaces, secure communications, and secure people (read polygraphed). That was quite an investment. “Add value” meant that their efforts wouldn’t simply result in more noise in the system. What they were doing had to be worthwhile. That required training (like protecting US privacy) and skills (like language).

We weren’t going to provide a SIGINT peep show, but I also made clear to the NSA folks that the value added by these customer-producers didn’t have to match the value we thought we could add. If they thought it worth their effort, we would not stand in the way. We had plenty of work to do, anyway.

 • • • 

O
VERALL, WE DIDN’T DO BADLY.
A few days into the Iraq conflict we could report that the Iraqis were having trouble communicating and had evacuated several facilities; power outages were affecting some units and SAM sites had been damaged.

But we weren’t getting the flood of signals we had anticipated. Chinese firms had put down extensive fiber-optic cable after the first Gulf War, and it was clear that the Iraqis were riding those lines now. We stepped up pressure on CENTCOM planners to put cable heads on the target list and to hit them hard even though some were in or near populated areas. The idea was to herd signals into the air, where we could intercept them.

It worked; kinetic operations were enabling intelligence collection. A week into the conflict, signals spiked to such a degree that linguists had to be called in off break to handle the increased volume. That greatly facilitated locating Iraqi units for destruction. Two weeks later we reported that the SIGINT targets we had been following in southern Iraq and Baghdad had “largely ceased to exist.”

The early bombing campaign had been bedeviled by GPS jammers that the Iraqis were using to spoof the guidance on American smart bombs. The SIGINT system managed to locate these elusive devices, and they were added to the target list as well. We also intercepted the communications of technicians servicing the system and cleared our reports to support State Department démarches to the supplier country.

We had less luck keeping “Baghdad Bob,” Saddam’s irritating English-speaking spokesman, off the air. He was using the same kind of rugged, miniaturized satellite kit that embedded American reporters were using to file stories on the war. It proved near impossible to geolocate his short and unpredictable broadcasts in time to do much about them. We tried, but it was hard to make Baghdad TV stay dead for very long. It wasn’t long, though, before his preposterous claims were given the lie by American armor doing gun runs through Baghdad.

The Geocell (chapter 3), launched shortly after 9/11, really came into its own in Iraq. Geocell developed its intelligence in dialogue with those who would use it. Procedures were crafted to match the rules of engagement of each client they served, since different forces have different needs with regard to the method and timeliness of their intelligence reporting.

In one instance, a product, built at the customer’s request, was designed to be ripped off a printer and brought to a helicopter as the mission lifted off.

In another instance, the Geocell was in live chat with an AC-130 gunship on-station, allowing those on board to fuse SIGINT with what they were seeing and with their local Predator UAV feed.

By early 2006, four thousand military members had been trained by the Geocell and given access to its products and databases. Sailors with the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, for example, could access the database to determine which of the hundreds of small dhows transiting the Gulf might have a terrorist-related communications device on board.

During the main combat operations in Iraq I also amped up the production of what we called SIGINT assessments. SIGINT products are usually confined to a summary of a communication or a group of closely
related communications. Anything more was traditionally done by all- source analysts at CIA or DIA. But I thought we were leaving a lot of SIGINT-derived insight on the floor, so I challenged our analysts to step back and write broad appreciations on what they were seeing and hearing. Two titles during this period stand out: “The Mood in Baghdad” and “Iraqi Irregulars Likely to Be a Long Term Problem.” Turned out to be very long term.

We also knew that there were going to be losses. I think I caught my largely civilian staff off guard when, at a planning meeting before the invasion started, I simply asked, “So what are our casualty notification procedures?” The silence that followed was more than a silent bureaucratic “I don’t know.” There was a sobering message sinking in.