Body Of Secrets

PAGE 19 Now readable, either fully or partially, were the encryption systems of such countries as: At the same time, American codebreakers also successfully broke the commercial codes of many countries, including our closest allies, allowing analysts to read confidential business transactions. These countries included Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Turkey, Afghanistan, Russia, China, Indochina, Thailand, Japan, Egypt, South Africa, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and Argentina. Chief of the commercial code unit, B-3-b, in 1944 was Lieutenant Benson K. Buffham, who would later become the agency’s deputy director. In 1945, B3-b was also assigned responsibility for attacking the diplomatic systems of Belgium, Haiti, Liberia, and Luxembourg. Many of those working on the unit’s commercial code problems were black, the agency’s only professional black employees.

These countries included: NSA, Jeannette Williams with Yolande Dickerson, The Invisible Cryptologists: African-Americans, WWII to 1956 (2001), p. 13.

23 Black Friday: On that day, August 25, 1948, the chief of the Soviet General Staff declared that "the transmission of . . . messages is permitted only by landline." According to a recent NSA report, "Within weeks, Soviet communications systems that had been successfully exploited since 1945 went off the air. The series of communications changes that began in November 1947 and culminated on Black Friday were catastrophic. Out of this devastation, Russian plaintext communications emerged as the critical provider of intelligence on our primary Cold War adversary." By July 1950, more than a million Soviet messages a month were being forwarded to NSA’s predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency, for analysis. It was projected that by April 1952, the volume of messages requiring processing would nearly double.

One unit, AFSA-231, which conducted traffic analysis on Russian messages, was all black and was known variously as "he snakepit," "the plantation," and "the black hole of Calcutta." At the time, racism was accepted policy within AFSA, and later NSA, as it was in most of society. "The agency is a microcosm of the nation at large," said Eugene Becker, who retired as NSA’s assistant deputy director for support services in 1992. "The workforce had a liberal cast, but seeded among the workforce were plenty of racists."

"the transmission of . . . messages;" "Within weeks, Soviet communications systems;" "he snakepit," "the plantation;" "The agency is a microcosm": NSA, Jeannette Williams with Yolande Dickerson, The Invisible Cryptologists: African-Americans, WWII to 1956 (2001), pp. 1-43.

76-77 Intercept operators kept track of the ship’s progress by intercepting its daily transmissions noting its position and triangulating it with "elephant cages," giant circular antennas: During the 1950s, NSA also successfully tracked Soviet submarines throughout the world by intercepting and triangulating their high frequency transmissions as they communicated back to their headquarters once a day. But in November 1960, everything suddenly went quiet and a massive search was undertaken to find the missing signals. Officials speculated that the Soviets, to hide the transmissions, had switched to "burst" communications — using special equipment to send out compressed messages lasting less than a second.

But about a month later, around Christmas Day 1960, an intercept operator at the listening post in Karamò rsel, Turkey began noticing some scratchy sounds over the Soviet frequencies he was monitoring. "It was sort of like a burst of static — but not quite," recalled William Reed, a Navy chief at the time. Using a devise known as a sonograph machine, Reed made a copy of the signal and analyzed it like a detective with a microscope. "I spread it out and took a closer look," recalled Reed. "I’ll be damned! It had bauds [data]! Tiny bauds; the most compressed signal that I had ever encountered. . . . Gotcha! It was a burst signal, and it had to be a Russian sub. . . . We fired the recording directly to the National Security Agency, and they were ecstatic!"

Reed eventually determined that the burst messages contained a "trigger" heading used to activate a Soviet recording device. NSA, therefore, built a similar device that would begin recording when the "trigger" heading was intercepted. But Reed knew that capturing a signal was one thing, breaking its underlying one-time code was another. "Even before NSA put their best code experts and computers to work trying to break the text," Reed said, "I knew it was unbreakable."

The next best thing was to try to triangulate the signal and locate the sub. This, however, was extremely difficult because of the swiftness of the signal. Three listening posts in different parts of the world would all have to be tuned, in real time, to exactly the right frequency at exactly the right second. "Since direction finders didn’t have time to get a live bearing," recalled Reed, "our only hope was to devise a means whereby we could obtain a bearing ‘after the fact’ from a recorded signal. That had never been done before. I didn’t believe that it could be done, but I was wrong. NSA engineers did exactly that during a crash program on a par (almost) with the Oak Ridge development of the atomic bomb during World War Two."

Key was speeding up progress on the "elephant cage" antennas. Giant, circular, fence-like arrays ten-stories tall and up nearly a fifth of a mile across, they looked like mammoth cages for elephants or dinosaurs. Also known as Wullenweber antennas, the "cage" was actually made up of several concentric circles of tall antenna elements designed to pick up signals from all directions. Intercept operators were housed in windowless, cube-shaped, cement blockhouses at the center of the array. Because a signal would hit one of the tall, thin, antenna elements a milisecond before any other, the technicians were able to determine from what direction the signal came. When three or more elephant cages snagged the same signal, lines would be drawn and where they bisected was the location of the transmitter — i.e. the ship, submarine, plane or land-based station.

In order to locate the elusive Soviet submarine signals, listening posts throughout the world were put on alert. Codenamed Project Boresight, when an automatic receiver picked up the trigger on one of the burst messages, a recorder instantly switched on. The signal was then recorded on a two-inch-wide magnetic tape that whizzed pass a recording head at five-feet a second. The intercepted messages would then be sent back to NSA’s A22 section, responsible for Soviet submarine activity.

Details on Project Boresight; comments by William Reed: William Reed with W. Craig Reed, "Thirteen Days: The Real Story," Troika Magazine (http://www.troikamagazine.com/network/13days.html) (March 15, 2001).

111 In late September, four Soviet submarines had slipped into the Atlantic from the Barents Sea: Thanks to Project Boresight, NSA was able to plot the locations of most of Russia’s submarine fleet at the time of the missile crisis. "We were told to maximize efforts to locate the position of every Soviet submarine possible," recalled William Reed, who was stationed in NSA’s A22 section (Soviet submarines) during the crisis. "We did so, and started to get hit after hit on Boresight. In late October we obtained Boresight fixes, and later visual sightings, of four Soviet Foxtrot-class attack boats converging on Cuba. We suspected more on the way." Reed and the Chief of A22 briefed President Kennedy on the NSA operation during the crisis.

"We were told": William Reed: William Reed with W. Craig Reed, "Thirteen Days: The Real Story," Troika Magazine (http://www.troikamagazine.com/network/13days.html) (March 15, 2001).

125 Khrushchev may have lost a fist but he gained an ear: In 1960 the KGB’s Eighth Chief directorate decrypted 209,000 diplomatic cables sent by officials in 51 nations. Seven years later, following the completion of Lourdes, Soviet codebreakers were able to solve 152 cipher systems employed by a total of 72 countries.

decrtypted 209,000: DIA, A. Denis Clift, "President’s Column," Defense Intelligence Journal (Summer 2000), pp. 1-2.

166 NSA began expanding its presence on Cyprus: Throughout the 1960s, the agency began sending select intercept operators through grueling yearlong courses in Arabic and Hebrew. At the same time it continued to expand its listening posts on Cyprus, the key location for eavesdropping on the region. Monitoring stations were quietly built at Karavas, Mia Milea, and in the shadows of Troodos Mountain. Another was set up at Yerolakkos, just outside of the capitol of Nicosia. But a major setback occurred in 1967 when Israel attacked the USS Liberty, an NSA eavesdropping ship, while it was in international waters off Egypt during the Six Day War (for further information see Chapter 7). Among those killed were a number of critically needed Arabic linguists.

"We lost most of our Arabic linguists on the Liberty," recalled James J. Welsh, a Navy Chinese linguist who was monitoring Mao’s Cultural Revolution from a listening post on Okinawa at the time of the attack. "They [NSA] said we’ve got an urgent need for Hebrew and Arabic linguists." Welsh volunteered to convert to an Arabic linguist and following 46 weeks of training was sent to Cyprus in 1969. His job was to penetrate communications networks used by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), at the time responsible for a number of violent attacks. It was the first time a terrorist group was included on target lists. "There was a big argument because it wasn’t a country," said Welsh about the reaction by many within NSA. Eventually Welsh and one other Arabic linguist became the entire PLO desk. Their focus was on intercepting the high frequency network containing messages sent between PLO offices throughout the Middle East.

Occasionally, Welsh would get a break when the CIA would obtain technical data from the Israelis following a raid on a PLO camp. Materials recovered from the organization’s radio room sometimes containing such things as names, addresses, and frequencies. But such help was rare. On the other hand, NSA would send intercepts detailing the movements of suspected terrorists to the CIA, which would in turn pass them on to Israeli intelligence — sometimes with deadly results. "They would pass it to the Israelis and some guy was dead," said Welsh. "We’d get a message that so and so was coming through the Athens Airport and then you’d read in the Jerusalem Post that some poor sucker had been killed in an airport." Senior U.S. intelligence officials apparently passed on the key details knowing — or at least having reason to believe — that the information would be used by the Israelis in carrying out assassinations or other violent terrorist actions.

In 1981 a presidential executive order was issued specifically outlawing federal employees from taking part in — or assisting — any assassination. "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government," says Executive Order 12333, "shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination."

With the new concentration on terrorist groups came a greater responsibility to issue warnings of impending attacks. But, according to information obtained for Body of Secrets, these warnings were sometimes missed or even ignored, leading to the death of many innocent people, including American diplomats. Cover-ups would often follow. In August 1972 Welsh was transferred from Cyprus to NSA headquarters to run the PLO desk in the agency’s Middle East section, G 7, and at the same time train other officials to take over the problem. But because of bureaucratic delays in processing his clearance, Welsh was not permitted to enter the building for five weeks.

On September 5, as Welsh’s paperwork was slowly being processed, five masked terrorists belonging to the PLO’s Black September faction climbed the six-foot six-inch fence surrounding the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany. By the time the attack was over, eleven Israeli athletes taking part in the Olympic games had been murdered. "I’m watching [on TV] the Munich Olympics occur — killing everybody," recalled Welsh. "I’m stomping around and I’m saying I’m supposed to be in that building [NSA headquarters]." During the time Welsh waited, NSA did not assign anyone to analyze the PLO intercepts flowing out of Cyprus.

Finally admitted into the headquarters building about September 15, he quickly began analyzing the daily intercepts. At the same time he also began going through the stack of messages that accumulated during his absence. Among them was a coded message sent from Benghazi, Libya, where the PLO terrorist training camps were located, to Abu Jihad, a leading PLO terrorist in Beirut. "It catches my interest because he’s a bad guy," said Welsh. The intercept was of a high frequency transmission in which the sender read a series of Arabic letters, in groups of five. An agency cryptanalyst had little trouble breaking the code and the message was sent back to Welch within a few hours. It might have been enough to trigger a warning to U.S. and German intelligence agencies. Dated three days before the Olympic attack, the deciphered message said, "The eight have left for Munich." "So what do you do?" asked Welsh. "I brought it to the attention of people and it went up the line and it just kind of disappeared."

Things would get worse. About six months later, on February 27, 1973, Welsh received an emergency call over a secure line from his sole PLO intercept operator at Yerolakkos in Cyprus. The subject concerned intercepts of a high level meeting of Yasir Arafat’s Al-Fetah guerrilla organization. "My man in Cyprus called me," said Welsh, "and said, ‘Jim, I just got Arafat and Salah Khalef [Abu Iyad] in Beirut talking to [Abu Jihad in] Khartoum and they’re going down a checklist of everything for an operation.’ After having done this for four years, we knew something was going to happen and it was going to be big. One, two, and three of Fetah — Arafat, Khalef, and Khalil al-Wazir [Abu Jihad] — were speaking together. ‘Has everybody arrived, is all the stuff there, everything’s in place.’ This was real. The last time we had seen Jihad involved was when he sent the guys off from Bengazi to Munich. Which was an unfortunate blunder on our part there."

The information was immediately passed to Frank Raven, chief of NSA’s G Group, responsible for eavesdropping on the non-Communist part of the world. He and Welsh took the information to the director, Air Force Lieutenant General Samuel C. Phillips, who agreed that a warning message should be sent to the U.S. embassy in Khartoum at the highest precedence — Flash — reserved for only the most important information. However, to hide the fact that the warning was coming from NSA, the message was first sent to the State Department in Washington, which would forward it to Khartoum. "We wrote that an imminent Black September operation was going to occur in Khartoum. We didn’t know where," said Welsh. Also mentioned was a codename for use in the operation, "Nahr al-Bard" — Cold River — and the fact that a high level diplomatic reception was scheduled to take place at the Saudi Arabian embassy.

But rather than simply delete NSA’s name and forward the Flash warning to Khartoum, which would have arrived there within minutes, a watch officer at the State Department decided to downgrade the precedence to routine, thereby delaying it by several days. "We were stunned the next day," recalled Welsh. "We get a Critic in that the ambassador and charge d'affaires are now being held hostage at the Saudi Arabian embassy."

Eight members of PLO’s Black September faction had raided the reception at the Saudi Arabian embassy, rounded up a group of diplomats and held them hostage. Among them was U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel and Charge d’affaires George Curtis Moore. The kidnappers demanded the release of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, as well as other Palestinians in jails throughout Europe and Israel. President Richard M. Nixon, however, refused to negotiate. As a result, Arafat’s deputy, Abu Iyad, transmitted a message to the terrorists containing the codeword "Nahr al-Bard" — Cold River. That was the signal to kill the Western diplomats. At 9:06 p.m. on March 2, Noel, Moore and Belgian charge d'affaires Guy Eid were hustled to the basement of the embassy, lined up against the wall, and shot. High frequency communications to and from PLO headquarters in Beirut, intercepted by NSA in Cyprus, confirming that the murders had taken place.

To Welsh, the news that the State Department delayed his warning message was devastating. Soon after the murders, NSA director Phillips personally went to the State Department to protest, but the blunder was quickly brushed under the rug. "This was a dream come true," said Welsh. "To actually have these guys intercepted, real time, discussing this operation — it couldn’t get any better. And then to have had it trashed down at the State Department, and then after that happened it became a non-event, we’re not going to talk about it anymore."

In fact, a well-organized cover-up appears to have taken place at the State Department to hid the existence of the delayed warning message. State Department security officials later discovered a message to the embassy in Khartoum ordering the destruction of all cables related to the murders. Copies at the State Department were also destroyed. Such an order could have come only from a high level official at State or the White House, according to State Department officials. The secret was well kept. Until now, the fact that a warning message had been sent had never been revealed.

"I think 27 years ago, Watergate was really getting to be a problem about this time," Welsh said in November 2000. "Richard Helms had just been fired at CIA. And the last thing that the Nixon Administration needed on the front page of The Washington Post was that the State Department failed to warn the embassy. And they didn’t want to pick one particular message out when the order went from State Department to Khartoum to destroy the cables — lets destroy them all, that way nobody’s going to know exactly what we’re up to."

Welsh feels that the time has come for NSA to release the intercepts — before and after the murders in Khartoum — to show Yasir Arafat’s direct involvement. "Was there some really good reason that exists up until today, this very moment," he asks, "that this warning message has to be kept hidden from any eyes and these tapes that were made of Yasser Arafat have been withheld from the public of the United States for 27 years?"

The murders in Germany and Sudan were milestones for NSA. From then on, terrorism would become a top focus within the agency. "By the time of the Munich Olympics and then Khartoum," said Welsh, "all of a sudden these things became very high priority items and everybody was interested in it. Prior to that it was a dead-end as far as the NSA people were concerned."

"We lost most of our Arabic linguists on the Liberty;" Welsh comments: Interview with James J. Welsh (November 16, 2000).

State Department security officials later discovered a message: Thomas Ross, "Another Cover-up Brewing at White House," Chicago Sun Times (July 13, 1974).

206 About noon at Stella Maris . . . a report was received from an Army commander there that a ship was shelling them from the sea: There is considerable doubt such a report was ever given or received. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli chief of staff during the war, later made no mention of any such report in his discussion of the Liberty incident. "A ship had been sighted opposite El Arish," he wrote in his memoir. "Following standing orders to attack any unidentified vessel near the shore (after appropriate attempts had been made to ascertain its identity), our air force and navy zeroed in on the vessel and damaged it."

Yitzhak Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs (Boston: Little, Brown 1979), pp. 108.

213 "Hey, Chief," the linguist shouted, "I’ve got really odd activity on UHF. They mentioned an American flag. I don’t know what’s going on": About the same time, similar intercepts — between an Israeli pilot and Tel Aviv — were picked up at a listening post in the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Dwight W. Porter, the U.S. ambassador at the time, was immediately notified. "It’s an American ship," Porter recalls the pilot as saying. Other intercepts then quoted Tel Aviv ordering the pilot to continue the attack, said Porter. Again the pilot notified Tel Aviv that the ship was American, and again Tel Aviv ordered the pilot to attack.

"It’s an American ship": Porter quoted in Evans and Novak column, New York Post (November 6, 1991), p. 19.

224 Later he called all his advisors for an emergency meeting in the basement Situation Room: "We were baffled," recalled Clark Clifford, who was present at the meeting. "From the beginning there was skepticism and disbelief about the Israeli version of events. We had enormous respect for Israeli intelligence and it was difficult to believe the Liberty had been attacked by mistake."

"We were baffled": Clark Clifford, Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1991), p. 446.

230 "I must have gone to the White House": The same day that McGonagle collected his Medal of Honor at the Navy Yard, Johnson awarded lesser medals to two Vietnam veterans in a ceremony at the White House. Also, during the 1960s fifteen Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded to Navy personnel. The only one not presented at the White House was the one awarded to McGonagle. Moorer served as Chief of Naval Operations from August 1967 to June 1970 and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from July 1970 to July 1974.

230 "No American investigators ever looked": The Navy Court of Inquiry report indicated that "it was not the responsibility of the court to rule on the culpability of the attackers."

U.S. Navy, Court of Inquiry report (LBJL, Liberty File)

230 How could a ship supposedly doing thirty knots have been mistaken for it?: Also, as the Israelis certainly knew, Egyptian ships used cursive Arabic script — not English — on their ships.

231 This was nonsense: In fact, when presented with the report, Commander Ernest C. Castle, the U.S. Naval attaché in Tel Aviv, sent a note to Washington discrediting the document. "The standing order to attack any ship moving at more than 20 knots is incomprehensible," he wrote, "If the 30-knot ship ‘couldn’t have been Liberty,’ it follows that it cold not have been El Quseir [with a top speed of 14 knots]." He added, "That a professional Naval Officer could look at Liberty and think it is a 30-knot ship is unlikely." Castle added, "That a professional naval officer could look at Liberty and think it a 30-knot ship is unlikely."

"The standing order to attack": U.S. Defense Attaché Office, Confidential message, 181830z (LBJL, Liberty file).

233 Even without the NSA evidence, many people in the administration disbelieved the Israeli "mistake" theory: "I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation," then Secretary of State Dean Rusk privately noted years later. "Their sustained attack . . . precluded an assault by accident or by some trigger-happy local commander. I didn’t believe them then and I don’t believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous."

"I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation": Letter, Rusk to James M. Ennes, Jr. (March 3, 1978).

238 "Congress to this day has failed to hold formal hearing for the record on the Liberty affair": By contrast, action was immediate following the October 12, 2000 attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 sailors — half the number who died on the Liberty. Within hours President Clinton called for a complete investigation. Within days a plane-load of FBI agents were on their way to Aden — including even the director. Also within days, the Yemeni government agreed to welcome the investigators and fully cooperate in the probe. Within a week a Congressional committee had held public hearings on the deadly attack and Secretary of Defense William Cohen had set up a special investigative committee.

239 Even more damningly: A report by Amnesty International makes the same charge, citing the deaths of four civilians over those two days. According to National Public Radio reporter Jennifer Ludden, "the accusation appears to be supported by the video footage."

"You see the road absolutely thick with civilians, recognizable women and children, trying to run while the Israelis were shelling the road and destroying cars on that road," recalled the BBC’s Bowen. "Now I don't think that' s the kind of due care that a standing army of a democracy should use when it's carrying out military operations."

Finally, in October 2000, Israel refused to cooperate with a United Nations inquiry into alleged human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza. The refusal followed a report by the U.N. Human Rights Commission charging "widespread, systematic and gross violation of human rights" during the violence that began on September 28. The resolution described some of Israel's actions as "war crimes." Rather than fighting stone-throwing protesters with water cannons and other anti-riot equipment, Israel responded with automatic weapons, often fired at the heads of the demonstrators, some of whom were children.

A report by Amnesty International; "the accusation appears to be supported;" "You see the road absolutely thick": Jennifer Ludden, "Analysis: British Broadcasting Corporation accuses Israeli Forces of Deliberately Firing on Civilians During its Withdrawal from Southern Lebanon," NPR "All Things Considered," (June 23, 2000).

Israel refused to cooperate; "widespread, systematic and gross violation;" "war crimes": "Israel Refuses to Cooperate with U.N. Rights Investigators," New York Times (October 20, 2000).

239 Since their attack on the Liberty, the U.S. taxpayers have subsidized the Israeli government to the tune of one hundred billion dollars or more: Israel is also one of the most aggressive countries targeting the U.S. for intelligence collection. In 1985 it was discovered that Israel had hired a mole, Jonathan Jay Pollard, at the heart of America’s intelligence community. According to a 1998 secret counterintelligence report, Israel continues to conduct extensive espionage operations against the United States — including seeking classified nuclear weapons information from the Department of Energy. "The Israelis target anyone with access to the classified and sensitive U.S. information they seek," said the report. "They have used common cultural and religious affiliation as a basis to elicit information and also as a basis for potential agent recruitment abroad and in the United States."

The report, produced by the U.S. counterintelligence community, placed Israel in the same category as Libya, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and China. "The Israeli intelligence services are particularly aggressive in dealing with U.S. officials and scientists within Israel," the report continued, "repeatedly demonstrating their interest in collecting almost any information pertaining to advanced military and civilian technology. DOE [Department of Energy] personnel who have traveled to Israel have experienced everything from unusual questions to the monitoring of their faxes to outright discovery of surveillance devices in their hotel rooms." Far from being naïve concerning the subject of signals intelligence, the report said Israel has extensive Sigint capabilities and uses them to intercept U.S. satellite communications.

The document also lends considerable weight to reports in 1997 that NSA intercepted a secure communication between a senior Israeli intelligence officer in Washington and a superior in Tel Aviv indicating Israel had another mole within the U.S. government. The intercept referred to someone code-named "Mega," and an effort to acquire a sensitive American document. "Mega" has never been identified.

"The Israelis target anyone": U.S. Counterintelligence Community, Secret/Noforn/Orcon, Foreign Collection Against the Department of Energy: Threat to U.S. Weapons and Technology (Fall 1998), pp. 10-11. The document is reproduced in Bill Gertz, The China Threat: How The People’s Republic Targets America (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000), pp. 207-224

Mega: Nora Boustany and Brian Duffy, "A Top U.S. Official May Have Given Sensitive Data to Israel," The Washington Post (May 7, 1997).

358 Among the results was a disastrous prolongation of the war in Italy: In 1943, a new ciphony system was developed and became the key link between Roosevelt and Churchill. Known as SIGSALY, each end of the connection consisted of 40 racks of equipment weighing over 50 tons. Using pulse code modulation and spread spectrum technology, the system remained unbroken throughout the war.

SIGSALY: NSA, J. V. Boone and R. R. Peterson, "The Start of the Digital Revolution: SIGSALY Secure Digital Voice Communications in World War II" (June 2000), pp. 1-11. See also, NSA, Patrick D. Weadon, "The SIGSALY Story" (undated), pp. 1-2.

369 As one generation of satellites replaced another or additional variations were added, codenames would multiply: Canon, Chalet, Vortex, Magnum, Orion, Mercury: At 9:38 p.m. on May 8, 1998, the ground around Cape Canaveral shook as 3.4 million pounds of thrust lifted a Titan 4B/Centaur launch vehicle from its launch platform at Complex 40. Five hours and fifty-two minutes later, 23,300 miles above Malaysia and Sumatra, a massive nine-story shroud popped open. Like a bat awaking at night, a tightly packed antenna — possibly as large as a football field — unfurled and Orion, the most advanced listening machine ever created, came to life. The six-ton spacecraft was positioned to eavesdrop on communications from India and Pakistan, the Middle East, China and North Korea. But because weeks of calibration, testing and signal sampling was needed before it could be fully functional, NSA totally missed the Indian nuclear weapons tests a few days later, on May 11 and 13.

The Orion mission — the third launch in the series — was part of the joint National Reconnaissance Office/NSA Integrated Overhead Sigint Architecture (IOSA-1). The next generation of Sigint spacecraft, IOSA-2, will be a radical departure from the geostationary megasatellites of today — designed to sit like eagles in an aerie. The emphisis will be on low-flying, compact constellations of eavesdropping satellites that will be able to cover much more of the earth. The goal, said NRO Director Keith Hall, is "collection on demand" from any spot on the planet. "Technology is on our side. We can make them smaller and deliver a much more robust, and in the end more capable, system."

One advantage of the numerous smallsats is they will be able to more quickly locate mobile surface-to-air missile radar systems. More satellites can take more bearings on the signals and thus pinpoint the weapons faster. But as the satellites drop from their perch and circle the globe, transmitting their intercepts back to NSA will become more complex. Gone will be a fixed ground station to collect all of the data. Instead, NRO is planning another new fleet of satellites to act as relay stations. These two-ton spacecraft will be placed close enough together in geostationary orbit so that, like basketball players, one can catch the pass from the low-flying Sigint spacecraft no matter where it is. Once caught, the relay satellite will transmit the data via laser pulses to the next satellite until the information finally reaches NSA’s dish antenna farm at Fort Meade. Laser pulses, which are from ten to one hundred times faster than today’s communications, will be necessary because greater quantities of signals that the Sigint satellite will intercept. However, development of satellite-to-satellite laser crosslinks are years down the road and IOSA-2 will probably not be a reality until at least 2010.

Although the agency has had great success with its space program, there are occasional setbacks. Three months after the success of Orion, the countdown began in the Titan 4 firing room for the launch of another Sigint mission. This time liftoff was scheduled for early in the morning. On August 12, the sky over Cape Canaveral was clear and the sun rose like a klieg lamp above the curving horizon of the Atlantic Ocean. On board the Titan 4A/Centaur was the last of an earlier generation of Sigint spacecraft codenamed Mercury. Fifteen of the satellites had been built in the late 1970s. Its destination was a stationary orbit about 23,000 miles above the coast of Somalia. From there, it would be able to monitor communications, radar, and other signals from emitters in India and Pakistan, as well as such problem areas as Bosnia.

At 7:30 a.m. the countdown was completed and 2.8 million pounds of fiery thrust exploded from nozzles beneath the Titan’s twin solid rocket boosters. As the launcher lifted skyward from Complex 41, it trailed a 500-foot-long yellow and deep orange plume. Within seconds the twenty-story rocket began its pitch toward the open ocean. But eight miles away, in the Range Operations Control Center, technicians began seeing trouble. Lateral flares of light began to emerge at right angles to the vehicle’s nozzles and a bright burst of light suddenly appeared, as if from a giant flashbulb.

Half a second later, as it was accelerating to Mach 1, there was another flash and the Titan shuttered. Fire could be seen along the length of one of the boosters. Then the vehicle pitched and began to break up. Two seconds later — just 46 seconds after liftoff — the mission flight control officer sent destruct signals and the Titan blew up like the finale at a 4^th of July fireworks display. "Oh no," gasped a launch official. "We have had an explosion."

A rust-colored "smoke ring," perfectly circular and thousands of feet in diameter, appeared. The blast was so powerful that ceiling panels bounced in buildings at the Cape and burglar alarms went off up to a dozen miles away. The shroud split open like a clamshell, spilling out its Mercury spacecraft, which tumbled toward the ocean four miles below. At one billion dollars — a quarter of NSA’s annual budget, it was the single most costly unmanned accident in 50-years of launch operations at Cape Canaveral.

Details on the Orion and Mercury launches are drawn from: Craig Covault, "Eavesdropping Satellite Parked Over Crisis Zone," Aviation Week & Space Technology (May 18, 1998), p. 30; Craig Covault, "Titan Explosion Destroys Secret ‘Mercury’ Sigint," Aviation Week & Space Technology (August 17, 1998), p. 28; Craig Covault, "Booster, Fluids Eyed in Blast," Aviation Week & Space Technology (August 24, 1998), p. 27; Robert Wall, "Titan IVA Explosion Linked to Wiring Flaw," Aviation Week & Space Technology (January 25, 1999), p. 43.

"collection on demand;" Technology is on our side": Joseph C. Anselmo and Philip J. Klass, "NRO Embraces Sigint Smallsats," Aviation Week & Space Technology (September 29, 1997), p. 35.

Details on IOSA-2 and the satellite laser system are drawn from: Joseph C. Anselmo, "NRO to test advanced laser communications," Aviation Week & Space Technology (July 20, 1998), p. 24

"Oh no": Duffin McGee, "U.S. Titan rocket explosion was $1 billion failure," Reuters (August 12, 1998).

408 Among the courses are FORNSAT (Foreign Satellite Collection), COMSAT (Communications Satellite Collection) . . . : A brochure for prospective signals analysts at NSA declares: "NSA’s signals analysts are seeking to recover, understand, and derive intelligence from all manner of foreign signals. As an example of this challenge, consider that hundreds or thousands of channels of mixed information types may be multiplexed together and transmitted digitally over a satellite or terrestrial link to form a single signal. Demodulating and unraveling the internal structure of such complex signals, to recover their information content and related data, is one job of the signals analyst, offering unique satisfaction to the technically trained professional."

"NSA’s signals analysts": NSA, "Career Opportunities in Signals Analysis," (undated, circa 2000).

423 Interviews with dozens of current and former NSA officials indicate that the agency is not currently engaged in "industrial espionage," the classic case of stealing from one company and giving to a competitor: "We don’t spy on you because, frankly, you don’t have much we’re interest in," former deputy secretary of defense John Hamry said facetiously at NSA in October 2000, referring to the European charges.

"We don’t spy on you": Address by John Hamry before the National Cryptologic Museum Foundation, NSA Research and Engineering Building, October 12, 2000.

425 It added, "The foreign firms that offer bribes typically win about eighty percent of the deals": During the first seventeen months of the Clinton administration, intelligence agencies alerted the White House some 72 times to crooked foreign business practices. These were cases where foreign firms or governments were using espionage or some other unethical method to take advantage of U.S. firms. The deals totaled about $30 billion. U.S. spy agencies even track "aggressive lobbying" by foreign governments on behalf of their domestic industries that are competing against American firms for business overseas. Over the course of eight years, beginning in 1986, intelligence agencies had identified about 250 such cases.

intelligence agencies alerted the White House some 72 times; The deals totaled about $30 billion; "aggressive lobbying;" identified about 250 such cases: Letter, Colin Jellush, Intelligence Community Issues Division to Don Mitchell, Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. Senate (April 8, 1994); published in U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, Hearings, Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States and its Interests Abroad (January 24, 1994).

431 Dean tossed the Huston Plan in his office safe and spun the dial: Despite the cancellation of the operation, NSA continued its reckless course, oblivious to laws and ethics. According to information obtained for Body of Secrets, in 1972 the agency began secretly distributing intercepts of American citizens to Republican campaign officials involved in a massive, illegal political espionage and sabotage operation. The eavesdropping reports were sent to the Nixon campaign’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). "CREEP was one of our addressees on [intercepts involving] American citizens abroad," said James J. Welsh who ran the section targeting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) at the time. "There was a special section at NSA doing cables, like Western Union," he added. "One of the info addressees of these things was CREEP."

The intercepts would have been very useful to a highly secret intelligence unit hidden within CREEP, especially if they contained information that could be used to embarrass or discredit Democratic opponents. One message Welsh recalls being sent to CREEP involved American citizens meeting with Palestinian officials. Among the espionage activities engaged in by the unit were such things as tailing members of Democratic candidates' families and creating dossiers on their personal activities; investigating the lives of dozens of Democratic campaign workers; stealing confidential campaign files; and forging letters and sending them out under the candidates' letterheads. Eventually the unit turned to break-ins and burglery, culminating in the infamous entry and attempted bugging of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex. The intelligence unit was funded with monies from a secret account controlled by former attorney general John Mitchell, head of the Nixon reelection campaign.

"CREEP was one of our addressees": Interview with former NSA intercept operator James J. Welsh (November 16, 2000).

The unit, it was later discovered: Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, "FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats," The Washington Post (October 19, 1972), p. A01.

444 In an attempt to prevent inappropriate intercepts and dissemination, frequent training sessions are conducted for intercept operators and analysts (seventeen in November 1998, for example): Overseeing NSA’s compliance with the various laws and executive orders dealing with who should and should not be listened to is a staff of six lawyers assigned to the Operations Directorate. In charge is Kevin Powers who began his career at the agency as a Chinese linguist.

457 Goss also said, "This should have come as a surprise to no one. Indeed, the Committee has, for at least three years, warned NSA and the Intelligence Community of concerns in these areas": The final straw came in 1998 with the report of the Technical Advisory Group, a board set up by the Senate intelligence committee to examine the agency’s capabilities. NSA, said the highly classified report, was "quite literally going deaf," adding that the agency had fallen short in dealing with the challenges of the information revolution due in part to an inadequate technical staff. A year later another study, this one examining NSA’s ability to collect and process "digital network intelligence," came to the same conclusion. NSA, it said, was ill-prepared to meet the challenges facing it today.

"quite literally going deaf": Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Technical Advisory Group (TAG) Report (June 1998).

"digital network intelligence;" ill-prepared to meet the challenges: Clapper Study of 1999 cited in NSA, New Enterprise Team Recommendations (October 1, 1999), p. 26.

459 Deputy Director Barbara McNamara outlined in stark numbers: Not only is NSA spreading itself thin attempting to listen in on ever increasing modes of communications, the tasks assigned to it by the White House, CIA, Pentagon and other customers are also exploding. In 1995 the agency received about 1,500 "immediate" requests for intelligence — known as ad hoc requirements. By the fall of 2,000 the number had already grown to 3,500 — a 170 percent increase. Analysts, said one senior NSA official, must "brute force" their way through massive amounts of information.

About 1,500 "immediate" requests for intelligence: Information from senior NSA official.

460 High on NSA’s worry list is the shift from microwave and satellite communications — whose signals NSA was adept at capturing with its eavesdropping satellites and ground-based stations — to buried fiber optic cables: NSA’s McConnell explained the problem: "Over ninety percent of today’s communications volume moves through fiber optic cables," he said, "a medium that does not radiate radio waves or magnetic signatures into the atmosphere as did those of the past. In addition to being contained inside a fiber optic cable, the complexity of the multiplexing schemes to, literally, "stuff" more and more information into a single strand of fiber is staggering; thousands and thousands of communicants are active at the same time on one strand of fiber. Imagine 30 to 40 thousand people having telephone conversations on a single strand of fiber with their voices miltiplexed in such a way that they are not aware they are sharing the line . . . How will Sigint collectors of the future sort out the single conversation of interest . . . .?"

Another major difficulty in eavesdropping on optical fibers is the necessity to convert the intercepted signals into an electronic format before the information can be processed. This slows down the data link between the optical network and NSA’s Sigint processing equipment. To solve the problem, engineers in NSA’s Sigint Research Office and the High Speed Security Solutions Branch, like magicians, turned to special mirrors. By greatly increasing the reflectivity of mirrors in the lasers used to channel the signals, the speed of the transmission was significantly boosted. This was done at NSA’s Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS) by developing unique etched laser facets that could be coated with highly reflective, dielectric mirrors. According to John Fitz, the Optics Team leader in NSA’s Advanced Development Group, "The goal will be to demonstrate a complete logic family operating at or near 100 gigabits per second with the speed, complexity, and density required for IA [Information Assurance] and Sigint applications."

Among the trickiest missions of NSA’s LPS is to discover advances in telecommunications — including fiber optics — far ahead of the commercial world. In this way, NSA is in a position to develop methods to successfully eavesdrop on the new systems before they become widely used. For example, the LPS’s Long-Haul Fiber Laboratory is racing to beat the rest of the world in discovering a technique to greatly extend the distance between regenerators on undersea optical fiber cables. In 2000 the lab came up with a new all-optical technique that extends the distance between regenerators by 20% to 30,000 km. NSA now has time to discover ways to tap the new cables. "NSA must be prepared to utilize this new type of signal," said Dr. Norm Moulton, a senior physicist with the LPS, "to gain critical intelligence in the future. Through these and other creative experiments applied to future fiber optic communications technologies, such as all-optical high-speed switching and routing, optical pulse shaping and optical logic, LPS will continue to be a major contributor to the future readiness of the Agency."

"Over ninety percent of today’s communications": J. M. McConnell, "The Future of Sigint: Opportunities and Challenges in the Information Age," Defense Intelligence Journal (Summer 2000), p. 44.

To solve the problem; "The goal will be to demonstrate": NSA, John Fitz, "High-Reflectance, Dielectric Mirrors for the Manufacture of Short-Cavity, Semiconductor Edge-Emitting Lasers," Tech Trend Notes (Fall 2000), pp. 12-15.

"NSA must be prepared": NSA, Dr. Norm Moulton, "Major Advance in Long-Haul Fiber Communications," Tech Trend Notes (Spring 2000), p. 6.

462 If signals are sent at sixteen different wavelengths through each of four pairs of optical fibers, information can be transmitted through a single Trans-Atlantic cable at 640 gigabits per second — the equivalent of ten million simultaneous telephone calls: "In a relatively short period of time," said Admiral McConnell in 2000, "we have witnessed data volumes for today’s communications systems move from a few gigabits — billions — to hundreds of gigabits per second. The ability to transmit a terabit — trillions — per second is presently being successfully tested. That would equate to the ability to move the data volume of the Library of Congress in minutes."

"In a relatively short period of time": J. M. McConnell, "The Future of Sigint: Opportunities and Challenges in the Information Age," Defense Intelligence Journal (Summer 2000), p. 44.

462 NSA Advisory Board: The 15 members of the board come from industry, government, academia, and other areas.

463 "We’re going to drown in fiber": Not to be outdone, NSA has contracted with Sandia National Laboratory to develop fiber optic systems with speeds that will exceed state-of-the-art commercial systems. Like warning signs at a railway crossing, electronic switches reduce the speed of light waves because in order to pass through they must be converted into electronic signals. To overcome this problem, NSA in 2000 was working on developing fully and partly optical switches. One such system has the unwieldy name, "extremely shallow quantum well self-electrooptic effect devices" or ESQW-SEEDs (pronounced Ess-Que-Seed). Although not a fully optical system, it has the advantage of behaving like one. "A remarkable thing about this kind of switch is its speed," said Harris Turk of NSA’s High Speed Security Solutions Branch. "Experiments . . . have demonstrated switching speeds faster than six picoseconds [trillionths of a second], and even faster devices are under development."

ESQW-SEEDs; "A remarkable thing": NSA, Harris Turk, "ESQW-SEEDs for a Photonic Key Generator," Tech Trend Notes (Summer 2000), p. 8.

464 We’re much further ahead now in terms of being able to access and collect network data, fiber optics: Although some have speculated that NSA may have succeeded in breaking into fiber optic networks, Thompson’s remarks to his employees is the first confirmation. In fact, is appears that a great many NSA intercepts come via fiber optic cables. One way this may be accomplished is through the use of new optical packet-copying test equipment, designed for use in servicing and repair of fiber optic cables.

465 "But I really need somebody today and for the next couple of years who knows Cisco routers inside and out and can help me understand how they’re being used in target networks": Just as NSA targets Cisco routers, it may also targets the half dozen key Internet hubs throughout the U.S. Known as Network Access Points (NAP), they are the massive cloverleaves on the Internet superhighway where data packages containing millions of messages enter and exit. Although located within the U.S., much of the traffic passing through these choke points is to, from, or between foreign countries. This is because the U.S. is the leading country in terms of volume and speed in routing Internet traffic. Also, data packets do not travel on a straight line between point A and point B. They travel on the route that is, at that moment in time, the least congested. Thus European and Asian message traffic may be routed through the U.S. to other countries — or even within their own nations — during America’s quiet night. These are the same hours that may be the busiest overseas.

As a result, networks throughout the world have direct links to American NAPs. Japan’s largest Internet backbone, for example, recently upgraded its link to the U.S. West Coast NAP in San Jose, California. Another link runs from Osaka to the large New York NAP in Pennsauken. Bell South is building in Florida what is billed as the fastest NAP in the country. According to a local newspaper, "Miami-Dade County is the logical point through which to run messages to and from South America, all of whose capital cities lie east of Miami. The map shows that it’s a logical place for U.S. connections to Africa, as well." Thus by tapping into NAPs, NSA would have a window on a tremendous amount of international communications.

At one time many of the Internet NAPs were run by the National Science Foundation but now they are being taken over by an assortment of phone companies. Many of these same companies recently joined with NSA to form a consortium called Multi-wavelength Optical Networking (MONET). It is billed as an experimental research network set up to explore advanced fiber-optic techniques, including routing/switching and optical monitoring. In fact it may be more. MONET puts NSA in a very desirable position with respect to discovering efficient and covert ways to tap into Internet networks. In fact, at the time MONET was announced, AT&T issued a press release saying that the primary purpose of the coalition was to meet "defense and security needs of the nation."

But as the Internet continues to grow, NAPs will also begin proliferating overseas, decreasing the need for messages to transit the U.S. Thus, NSA will have to develop way to access those hubs, especially in such potentially worrisome nations as China. For years, because of a poor telecommunications infrastructure, interconnections among different Internet backbones in China were routed through foreign gateways. That was good for NSA. But in 2000 work began on a major NAP in Beijing which, when completed, will service all eight of China’s major Internet backbones.

473 He also ordered the personnel promotion process streamlined: Hayden hired New Age management guru Peter Senge "to help us manage change effectively," said Hayden. Author of the influential 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline, Senge encourages managers to meditate, particularly during meetings, and advocates group silence. Any member during a meeting can call for silence at any time to relax and refocus.

Finally, on Saturday October 14, 2000, Hayden called a rare weekend meeting of the agency’s top 285 senior executives in the Friedman Auditorium. Standing on the stage, he told the nervous officials that he had decided to centralize even more authority within his office and that he was therefore doing away with two of his top five deputies — support and corporate management. Those responsibilities and others, he said, would now be run from the director’s suite. He also did away with the position of executive director — the number three official in the agency — and replaced it with a more powerful chief of staff who would report directly to Hayden. Named to the job was Rear Admiral (lower half) Joseph Burns, the former deputy director for corporate management. The moves placed more day-to-day management — and power — in the director’s hands then ever before.

The centerpiece of Hayden’s Sigint reorganization was Project Trailblazer 1, which Hayden describes as "building the Sigint system we would want to build, if we were starting from scratch today." Another official compared Trailblazer to the innovative Saturn automotive plant — a facility where cars are built based on new thinking and new ideas.

Rather than focusing on old technologies and targets — high frequency intercepts of tank maneuvers, for example, -- the goal of Trailblazer is to find ways to conquer the new sciences — fiber optics, cell phones, and the Internet. "The Trailblazer team," said Hayden, "will look at the end-to-end Sigint process to determine where information vital to customer requirements can be most readily obtained."

hired Peter Senge: DIA, Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden, "The Change Imperative," Defense Intelligence Journal (Summer 2000), p. 30.

"to help us manage change effectively": Ibid.

encourages managers to meditate: "The Knowledge," The Economist (November 11, 1995), p. 63.

call for silence at any time: Bruce Rosenstein, "Get change going with 'sacred' meetings, silence," USA Today (June 7, 1999), p. 8B.

he called a rare weekend meeting: Interview with NSA official Judi Emmel (October 17, 2000).

"The Trailblazer team": DIA, Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden, "The Change Imperative," Defense Intelligence Journal (Summer 2000), p. 30.

473 Finally, in June 2000 Barbara McNamara received her long-expected transfer to London: McNamara flew to London on July 3 to begin her new assignment as NSA’s liaison officer. Within hours of her arrival the next morning she joined 832 others at a 4^th of July party hosted by NSA at GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham.

she joined 832 others at a 4^th of July party: NSA, "SUSLO 4^th of July Celebration," NSAN (October 2000), p. 11.

487 One of the first established was the Crypto-Linguistic Association: The group also sponsors an annual banquet which hosts unique speakers. One year Dr. Marc Okrand, developer of Star Trek’s Klingon language, addressed the issue "Linguistic Fact and Fiction: the Plight of Klingon."

"Linguistic Fact and Fiction": NSA brochure, "The Crypto-Linguistic Association Founded 1965," (undated).

495: On a table behind him, next to his NSA flag, are three computers, one for classified work, another for unclassified work, and a secure laptop linking him with his NSA Advisory Board, a small group of outside consultants: To illustrate the fact that NSA’s communications infrastructure was, in Gen. Hayden’s words, "anarchic, convoluted and complex," Hayden noted that none of the three computers can communicate with each other. When asked what it would take to send an e-mail to all of NSA’s 38,000 people, Gen. Hayden replied sarcastically, "An act of God."

"anarchic, convoluted and complex," none of the three computers; "An act of God": Neil King Jr., "Big Technology Players Vie To Upgrade NSA Computers," The Wall Street Journal (March 13, 2001), p. B1.

498 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: In 2000, NSA had more than 1,000 people deployed with customer organizations.

In 2000, NSA had more than 1,000: NSA, New Enterprise Team Recommendations (October 1, 1999), Appendix B, p. 13.

500 Taylor’s deputy is Air Force Major General Tiiu Kera: 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, another of Taylor’s top deputies always comes from the CIA.

503 Today the organization operates as the nation's chief warning bell for the launch of foreign rockets — whether ballistic missile tests from China or North Korea or an attack from a rogue launch site in Russia: "There are 20,000 Russian tactical nuclear weapons that we still don’t know where they are," former under secretary of Defense John Hamry warned a group at NSA in October 2000.

"There are 20,000 Russian tactical nuclear weapons": Address by John Hamry before the National Cryptologic Museum Foundation, NSA Research and Engineering Building, October 12, 2000.

510 Among the programs produced at the Television Center: NSA also has its own short version of "60 Minutes" — called "15 Minutes" — which is shown on Mondays every hour on the hour.

519: Thus its mammoth tape library may soon reach the point where all the information on the planet can be placed inside, with room left over: The storage capacity of the agency’s internal network alone — not counting its Sigint mission computers — is 22 terabytes, enough to easily store the entire contents of the Library of Congress with room left over. And the computing power of the various "non-mission" systems is 15 tera-Hertz — equal to the computing power of Bell South and Sprint combined.

twenty-two terabytes; 15 tera-Hertz: NSA, Project Groundbreaker Fact Sheet

520 It is the home of NSA’s Information Systems Security Organization: This is the agency’s codemaking group, made up of about 2,000 people with a budget of about $600 million a year.

about 2,000 people with a budget of about $600 million a year: Brian D. Snow, NSA Infosec technical director, address before the National Cryptologic Museum Foundation on October 12, 2000.

522 Within the new Research and Engineering Building is NSA’s Microelectronics Research Laboratory: The lab began operations in 1991.

522 works on such projects as thinning technology to reduce the thickness of circuitry on computer wafers to half a micron making them virtually vanish from existence: By comparison, a sheet of paper is about 100 microns thick. It was anticipated that by 2001 the lab’s fabrication process would reduce the size of a circuit to .22 micron. With circuits now shrunk to almost nothing, the lab’s next mission was to find ways to pack as many of them as possible into a finite space. Thus the creation of Project NanoCube. Among its goals is to develop new methods in which to assemble a large number of highly advanced integrated circuits into a very small volume. One method on which the lab is currently working is to stack the ultra-thin circuits on top of each other in a three-dimensional design. According to Daniel A. Anthony, the Lab’s technical director and project manager for Project NanoCube, "This technology may well represent an ultimate scale in terms of volume shrinkage of integrated circuitry."

reduce the size of a circuit to .22 micron: NSA, Leland Miller, "NSA Microelectronics Laboratory," Tech Trend Notes (Fall 1997), p. 1.

Project NanoCube; "This technology may well represent": NSA, Daniel A. Anthony and David J. Mountain, "NanoCube: Thin Is In," Tech Trend Notes (Summer 2000), p. 3.

525 The program, which consists of two years of part-time classes, includes ten prescribed intelligence core courses and four Sigint related electives, along with a thesis: Among the Sigint related electives is: SIG 604 — Sigint Against Unconventional Targets

528 Sixty-three percent of the work force has less than ten years experience,thirteen percent are in the military (including four generals and admirals), twenty-seven percent are veterans and 3.3 percent are retired military: In addition to civilian and military employees, 2,300 contractors are employed full time at the agency.

2,300 contractors are employed full time: NSA, New Enterprise Team Recommendations (October 1, 1999), Appendix B, p. 23.

573 Groundbreaker: The project, which will involve re-networking about 100,000 personal computers, telephones and servers used for non-Sigint activities, is valued at as much as $5 billion over 10 years. Thus there is great competition for the contracts. Among the more than 15 companies competing are AT&T, Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM, General Dynamics, and OAO Corporation. A winner was expected to be selected by July 2001.

Groundbreaker details: NSA, Project Groundbreaker Fact Sheet

576 It went on to warn that if the pattern continued, NSA would face a future where large segments of its workforce will leave "at roughly the same time without a sufficient cadre of skilled personnel to carry on the work": It was an accurate projection. In 1999 NSA was able to hire only 25% of the critical skill employees that had retired in the previous year and that number was expected to continue growing at least until 2003.

In 1999 NSA was able to hire only 25%: NSA, "External Team Report: A Management Review for the Director, NSA" (October 22, 1999), p. 18.

602 Four years after Seymour Cray died, a machine bearing his name would at last break the tera barrier: Also in 2000, SRC Computers, the company Cray founded just before his fatal accident, unveiled Cray’s final brainchild — the SRC-6. The unique system, which looks like two giant audio speakers and starts at about a million dollars, is reported to be excellent for data mining.

SRC-6; data mining: David Einstein, Forbes.com (October 30, 2000).

603 The RS/6000 SP, said IBM executive David Turek, is "supercomputing at your fingertips.": In June 2000, IBM completed work on a new RS/6000 called ASCI [for Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative] White. At 12.3 teraflops (trillion operations a second) — 1,000 times faster than Big Blue, it is the fastest machine ever built. It may also be the largest. The $110 million computer covers 9,920 square feet of floor space — the equivalent of two basketball courts — and weighs as much as 17 adult elephants — 106 tons. Transporting the computer, which contains 8,192 linked microprocessors, requires 28 tractor trailer trucks.

Unfortunately for IBM, the RS/6000 SP may be the speed champ only briefly. Due out in 2002 is ASCI Q, being built by Compaq. It is expected to achieve 30 teraflops, have nearly 12,000 microprocessors, and occupy 21,000 square feet -- as much floor space as half a football field.

ASCI White: Phil Waga, IBM to Unveil Super Compter," Gannett News Service (June 29, 2000).

ASCI Q: "FG Wilson Successfully Implements Motiva Echange Solutions: Dept. of Energy selects Compaq for Powerful Supercomputer," Mainframe Computing (October 1, 2000). See also, "Energy Department and Compaq Announce Contract for delivery of Record-Breaking Supercomputer," Regulatory Intelligence Data (August 22, 2000).

608 When NSA crosses the pentaflop threshold, if it hasn't already, it is likely that the rest of the world will never know: NSA’s race to build the fastest computer is more than academic. According to an NSA report, by the year 2010 even rogue nations and terrorists organizations may have the ability to acquire supercomputer power in the yottaflop range — despite the worldwide embargo on the sale of supercomputers to such states and groups. This is as a result of tremendous advances in distributed processing — linking together thousands of small personal computers over the Internet.

"By 2010, judged by the standards of what constitutes a supercomputer in the year 2000, an average personal computer will have near-supercomputer or supercomputer capabilities," said the report. Superfast fiber optic networks will also be widespread. The result, says NSA, will be "the proliferation of ‘virtual parallel supercomputers’ with aggregate computational capabilities that measure in the 10²¹ to 10²⁴FLOPS [yottaflop] range or higher."

Thus small hostile nations or groups could easily and cheaply acquire computer power with speeds of more than a septillion operations a second. "A capability that was once exclusive to highly-developed nations," said the report, "or the largest research facilities will become available to individuals, groups, and nations, including many of dubious stability or intent." Among other things, the computational power will give them an ability to attack and possibly break American banking and other personal and business encryption systems. "The ability to attack and potentially exploit communications could be used to identify or create security weaknesses and seek access to financial traffic, including international financial settlements," said the report.

The idea is far from theoretical. In April 2000, a team of four from the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control scaled the Mt. Everest of codebreaking. They solved one of the most difficult and complex public-key cryptographic systems in use today, a radically new encryption technique known as elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC). The fiendishly complex system, in which keys are generated by calculating the number of points on a curve, will likely be used to secure the next generation of wireless telephones and other devices.

ECC is believed to offer higher security — yet with smaller key sizes — than the popular and long established RSA encryption system. To test the security of the system, the Canadian cryptographic company Certicom offered a $10,000 prize to anyone who could decipher a list of ECC private keys from a list of ECC public- keys.

Led by Irish mathematician Robert Harley, the team recruited help from 1,300 volunteers scattered around the world in forty countries. With their combined 9,500 computers connected via the Internet, the codebreakers launched a brute force attack on the maddeningly difficult 109-bit crypto system — equivalent to an RSA system 600-bits long. After just four months of number-crunching, they came up with the solution. Had the same amount of work been done on a single 450 MHz machine, the computation would have taken 500 years.

"By 2010, judged by the standards": NSA, David Aswad, "Distributed Processing," Tech Trend Notes (Summer 2000), p. 11. According to Aswad, the average personal computer in 2010 will include "CPUs with operating speeds above 50GHz and a 128-bit bus, 50 GB to 1 TB random access memory, 10-100 TB storage, and CPU performance will be in the 500 billion floating point operations per second (FLOPS) to 3 trillion FLOPS range."

"A capability that was once": Ibid, p. 12.

"The ability to attack": Ibid.

Details on the breaking of the ECC crypto system are drawn from: NSA, "Public-Key Cracked," Tech Trend Notes (Summer 2000), p. 12. See also, Certicom Corp. press release of April 17, 2000 and INIRA press release of April 13, 2000.

610 For example, it may be an error in a Russian encryption program, or a faulty piece of hardware, or sloppy transmission procedures: It may also be when a buffer memory overflows on a "secure" computer, or when a "secure" operating system crashes as a result of an application misbehaving, or an error in an encryption program.

668 the codemakers welcomed the news with considerable apprehension: The time when NSA had a monopoly over codemaking and powerful computers — the 1950s — has long past. According to worried NSA officials, the trend away from secure in-house produced technologies and toward commercial off-the-shelf systems accelerated greatly during the 1990s. "The historical flow of technology from government to industrial and home users has been largely reversed," said an NSA report in 2000. "We often find technologies that are more sophisticated in our homes earlier then in our government workspaces." NSA officials were so concerned by the accelerating shift that the NSA Advisory Board began in internal review and Tiger Teams were assembled to determine whether security was being breached. The result was NetTop, a novel architecture made up of commercial technologies — such as workstations — fortified by government produced components.

"The historical flow of technology": NSA, Robert Meushaw and Donald Simard, "NetTop," Tech Trend Notes (Fall 2000), p. 3.

612 According to Bell Labs physicist Bernard Yurke, eventually it might be possible to bind electronic components to DNA: NSA has a special interest in the future of DNA computing. One researcher used it to crack the 56-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES). "DNA computing offers massively parallel processing, very low energy consumption, and huge amounts of memory and storage," said one NSA report in 2000. "The use of DNA molecules, rather than electronic circuits and magnetic or optical storage media, may revolutionize the supercomputer industry and become a reality in the next decade."

One researcher used it: NSA, William Straka, "DNA Computing," Tech Trend Notes (Summer 2000), p. 20.

"DNA computing offers": Ibid.

613 Eventually NSA may secretly achieve . . . the human brain: A Fall 2000 NSA publication noted that Lucent Technologies and MIT have created an electronic circuit that mimics the biological circuitry of the cerebral cortex, the brain’s center of intelligence. The circuit is composed of artificial neurons that communicate with each other via artificial synapses. All of these elements are made from transistors on a silicon integrated circuit.

NSA, "Brain Circuitry," Tech Trend Notes (Fall 2000), p. 32.