The Secret Sentry (32 page)

The long series of crises described above stretched collection resources to the breaking point and diverted personnel and
capital away from much-needed modernization programs and infrastructure improvement projects.
⁵²

As a result, the crucial reform plans that Mike McConnell brought with him when he came to the agency in May 1992 never got
implemented. In fact, all indications are that NSA’s bureaucratic infarction got worse during McConnell’s tenure, leading
the agency to make costly mistakes in resource allocation and spending priorities. For example, a 1996 Defense Department
inspector general report revealed that in 1991 and 1992 alone, NSA lost eighty-two million dollars’ worth of equipment, which
it chose to write off on its financial statements rather than find out the fate of.
⁵³

But what was really killing NSA was the size of the agency’s payroll. Although the number of NSA personnel plummeted during
McConnell’s tenure, the cost of paying those who remained skyrocketed as the agency had to reach deep into its pockets to
try to keep its best and brightest from jumping ship and joining the dot-com boom. NSA stripped ever-increasing amounts of
money from infrastructure improvement programs and its research and development efforts so that it could meet its payroll.
It was left with little money to develop and build the new equipment desperately needed to access international communications
traffic being carried by new and increasingly important telecommunications technologies, such as the Internet, cellular telephones,
and fiber-optic cables. It was a decision that would, according to a former senior NSA official, “come back and bite us in
the ass.”
⁵⁴

The Minihan Years at NSA: 1996–1999

In February 1996, NSA director McConnell retired. During his tenure, in the opinion of senior agency officials, he simply
failed to address the stultifying bureaucracy in NSA’s upper ranks and to fully grasp the scope of agency operations, though
he was an effective spokesman for NSA in front of administration officials and Congress.
⁵⁵

His replacement was the fifty-two-year-old director of DIA, Lieutenant General Kenneth Minihan of the U.S. Air Force. A career
intelligence officer but with little operational experience with SIGINT, Minihan was born in Pampa, Texas, on December 31,
1943. After graduating from Florida State University in June 1966, he was commissioned into the air force. As he moved up
in rank, he served in a wide variety of intelligence positions, including air force assistant chief of staff, intelligence,
from 1994 to 1995; he was the director of DIA from 1995 until being named NSA director in February 1996.
⁵⁶

By his own admission, Minihan was chosen because the Pentagon believed he would not only emphasize SIGINT support for the
military, but also improve the Pentagon’s shaky customer-client relationship with the agency.
⁵⁷

Many former senior NSA officials interviewed for this book regard Minihan’s tenure at Fort Meade, from 1996 to 1999, as a
period fraught with controversy, during which NSA continued to refocus its efforts away from traditional targets and toward
new transnational targets, such as narcotics trafficking and international terrorism, and not always with great success. Money,
or lack thereof, was a recurring theme during Minihan’s term in office. NSA, like every other agency in the U.S. intelligence
community, was trying to get more money out of the Clinton White House or Congress, but without much success. CIA director
George Tenet admitted, “The fact is that by the mid-to late 1990s American intelligence was in Chapter 11, and neither Congress
nor the executive branch did much about it.”
⁵⁸
This led to pitched battles within the intelligence community over which agency would get how much of the money grudgingly
allocated by Congress. In November 1998, Minihan, who by this time was a lame duck, made a final plea to the White House and
the Pentagon to approve more money for NSA, pointing out that since the end of the Cold War, the agency had lost one third
of its manpower and budget and much of its ability to access target communications, and that its antiquated infrastructure
was crumbling and desperately in need of repair. He failed, in part because of the widely held view that NSA was being badly
mismanaged.
⁵⁹

The congressional intelligence oversight committees could not get Minihan or his deputy, Barbara McNamara, to make fundamental
reforms or even to send to Congress something as simple as a business plan for the agency. Inaction on the part of the agency’s
leadership forced Congress to act. In the House Intelligence Committee’s May 1998 annual report, the chairman, Porter Goss,
announced that his committee had “fenced in,” or restricted, the agency’s access to a large part of its annual budget because
of NSA’s continuing intransigence and resistance to reform.
⁶⁰

Today, in the opinion of some NSA veterans, Minihan’s tenure at the helm of NSA is viewed as having been largely ineffectual.
When he produced an agency mission statement in June 1996 titled “National Cryptologic Strategy for the 21st Century,” agency
staff members were mortified to find it full of vague generalities rather than specifics about how NSA was to meet the increasing
challenges it faced.
⁶¹

Efforts by Minihan and his staff to patch up the agency’s rocky relationship with the Pentagon largely failed. In March 1997,
a full year after he took office, Minihan briefed the senior military leadership on how NSA would improve its SIGINT support
for the military. One senior military intelligence official who attended it recalls that Minihan used every current Pentagon
buzzword (
asymmetric
,
paradigm
,
templates
, etc.) but offered nothing tangible about how things would be improved—other than suggesting that NSA and the military work
more closely together.
⁶²

Yet as the NSA muddled along and one scandal after another rocked the CIA during the mid-1990s, and as the agency’s clandestine
intelligence capabilities slowly eroded, the Clinton administration came to increasingly treat NSA and its sister intelligence
organization, the National Reconnaissance Office, with greater deference, in large part because the SIGINT coming out of NSA
was viewed as “cleaner” and less controversial than the material produced by the CIA.
⁶³

The War on Terrorism

During General Minihan’s term, the radical Islamic terrorist group al Qaeda (Arabic for “the base”) began appearing on the
U.S. intelligence community’s radar screen. It was headed by a Saudi multimillionaire and veteran of the 1980s war against
the Soviets in Afghanistan named Osama bin Laden, who was then living in exile in the Sudan. The earliest known NSA reporting
on bin Laden’s activities dates back to 1995 and was based in large part on monitoring the telephone calls coming in and out
of his ranch near the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. For example, the agency intercepted a series of telephone calls congratulating
bin Laden on the June 25, 1996, bombing of the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen American military
personnel. (In fact, it was Hezbollah and the Iranian government, not al Qaeda, that had carried out the Khobar Towers attack.)
⁶⁴

Despite these successes, NSA was experiencing considerable difficulty monitoring bin Laden. But when he was forced out of
the Sudan in mid-1996 by the Sudanese government and moved to Afghanistan, it made SIGINT coverage of his activities significantly
easier.
⁶⁵

In November 1996, one of bin Laden’s operatives in the United States, named Ziyad Khalil, purchased a Inmarsat Compact M satellite
telephone and more than three thousand hours of prepaid satellite time from a company in Deer Park, New York, for seventy-five
hundred dollars. In a matter of weeks, the sat phone was in the hands of bin Laden in Afghanistan. It was assigned the international
telephone number 00873-682-505-331.
⁶⁶
When NSA was unable to intercept all of the satellite phone traffic, the CIA mounted its own in-de pendent SIGINT collection
operation. The CIA managed to intercept half of the traffic, and NSA succeeded in getting the rest, but refused to share its
take with the CIA.
⁶⁷

Over the next two years, NSA’s relationship with the CIA deteriorated as officials from the two agencies clashed repeatedly
and refused to cooperate with one another on joint SIGINT operations against al Qaeda. During this period, NSA and the CIA
in dependently monitored the telephone conversations of bin Laden and his military operations chief, Mohammed Atef, as they
kept in touch with their operatives and sympathizers around the world. Some of these intercepts helped foil a number of bin
Laden terrorist plots, including two terrorist attacks on American embassies overseas in 1997 and seven attacks on American
diplomatic or military establishments overseas in 1998, among them a planned bombing aimed at American forces stationed at
Prince Sultan Air Base, in Saudi Arabia, and the hijacking of an American airliner.
⁶⁸

Up until this point, NSA’s efforts to monitor bin Laden’s activities had been underresourced and desultory. But on August
7, 1998, this changed when al Qaeda operatives bombed the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,
killing 224 people (12 of whom were Americans) and injuring thousands more. Overnight, bin Laden became the agency’s number-one
target. Unfortunately, news reports after the East Africa bombings revealed that NSA was listening to bin Laden’s phone conversations.
Two months later, in October 1998, bin Laden ceased using the satellite telephone, depriving NSA and the CIA of their best
source of information about what bin Laden and his cohorts were up to.
⁶⁹

The Hayden Era at NSA

On February 23, 1999, the Pentagon announced that NSA director Minihan’s replacement was to be Major General Michael Hayden
of the U.S. Air Force, who was then serving in Seoul as the deputy chief of staff of the United Nations Command and U.S. Forces
in Korea. Hayden, age fifty-two, was a veteran intelligence officer who had held a wide variety of high-level intelligence
and policy positions over a thirty-two-year career prior to being named NSA director. These included involvement managing
intelligence collection operations in the former Yugo slavia during the mid-1990s war in Bosnia, and commanding the Air Intelligence
Agency from January 1996 to September 1997. Hayden pinned on his third star and then arrived for his first day of work at
Fort Meade on March 26, 1999.
⁷⁰

Genial but unprepossessing, Hayden was described by journalist Bob Woodward as “short and balding, with a big head and large-framed
eyeglasses— definitely not out of central casting for a TV talk show or a general.” But Hayden’s qualities had nothing to
do with his looks. His subordinates had to learn to pace themselves for the long, grueling days that he put in at the office.
He had a reputation for being thoughtful, honest, and forthright and was well known within the U.S. military establishment
for his low-key management style and, perhaps more important, his ability to get along with people with temperaments and personalities
different from his own. Hayden had just taken over when the United States plunged into another war in the former Yugoslavia,
a territory that he knew all too well from his involvement in the mid-1990s conflict. This time, the war was over yet another
rebellious Yugoslav province that was seeking its independence—Kosovo.

SIGINT and the War in Kosovo

The three-month war in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, which lasted from March 24, 1999, to June 10, 1999, pitted the overwhelming
might of the combined military forces of the United States and NATO against Slobodan Milos?e-vic ´’s overmatched Yugoslavian
military. After talks held in Rambouillet, France, to try to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the Kosovo crisis resulted
in stalemate, the decision was made to wage a unique kind of war, one conducted from the air only. On March 24, U.S. and NATO
warplanes began bombing Yu-go slav military positions in Kosovo and throughout Yugoslavia to force the Belgrade government
to accept the terms of the Rambouillet Accord. The name given to the U.S. and NATO bombing campaign was Operation Allied Force.
Most of NSA’s SIGINT effort was focused on collecting as much intelligence as possible about the Yugoslav strategic command-and-control
network and air defense system to help the U.S. and allied warplanes win air superiority.

All in all, postwar reporting indicated that NSA performed well during the war, with more than 300,000 Yugoslav telephone
calls, 150,000 e-mail messages, and over 2,000 fax messages being intercepted, covering Yugoslav troop movements, force status
reports, logistics updates, hospital duty logs, and more. It was a very impressive performance for a three-month conflict,
made all the more remarkable by the fact that literally no American soldiers were killed in action.
⁷¹

The 100 Days of Change

Hayden entered the Fort Meade complex in March 1999 determined to make his mark quickly on the agency he had inherited. He
flew down to Austin to meet with former NSA director Bobby Ray Inman, who was now teaching at the University of Texas. Inman
advised Hayden that the biggest challenge he would face running NSA was obstruction from NSA’s senior civilian officials,
which Inman had encountered when he ran the agency during the 1970s.
⁷²

Hayden flew back to Fort Meade and found on his desk a thick report prepared for his predecessor, Minihan, by the NSA Scientific
Advisory Board, chaired by retired lieutenant general James Clapper Jr. The Clapper report confirmed many of the findings
of the House and Senate intelligence committees, including the conclusions that because the agency did not have a business
plan, it was mismanaging its SIGINT collection assets, and that the agency research and development efforts “lacked focus
and innovation.” A second report from Clapper arrived a few months later, which urged Hayden to retool NSA “organization ally,
programically, and technologically.” This was followed by an April 9 memo from his director of operations, James Taylor, who
told Hayden in no uncertain terms, “The first and most important issue for NSA/CSS is to reform our management and leadership
system . . . We have good people in a flawed system.”
⁷³