Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (16 page)

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Two hundred miles north of
Washington, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, shipfitters riveted steel seams together
and welded joints in place. Blue sparks flew about and industrial pounding
filled the air. Men in hard hats cut, straightened, and shaped large metal
plates, and electricians strung miles of wire like endless strands of black
knitting yarn. In a long, boxy dry dock, welder's torches were bringing back to
life the rusting skeleton and gray skin of a ship long discarded.

Like an
early baby boomer, the SS
Samuel R. Aitken
was launched in Portland,
Maine, on July 31, 1945. Named for an Irishman who came to the United States at
the turn of the century and later became an executive with Moore-McCormack
Lines, the
Aitken
was one of the mass-produced cargo vessels known as
Liberty ships. Because it arrived too late for the war, it instead spent a few
years hauling freight from port to port under the colors of Moore-McCormack.
But after only three years in service, the
Aitken
was given early
retirement and sent to a nautical boneyard in Wilmington, Delaware.

Now, under
a heavy cloak of secrecy, the
Samuel R. Aitken
was being called back
into service, but this time as a spy.

About the
same time that John F. Kennedy was elected president, NSA director John
Samford's tour ended with considerably more attention than it began. Just
before his scheduled retirement in November 1960, the agency suffered the worst
scandal in its history when two of its analysts, William H. Martin and Bernon
F. Mitchell, defected to Moscow.
 
As a result of the
defection, NSA's organizational structure was quickly changed. ADVA and GENS
were combined into A Group, the largest organization, focusing on all analysis
of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. ACOM became B Group,
responsible for China, Korea, Vietnam, and the rest of Communist Asia, as well
as Cuba. And ALLO was transformed into G Group, which tackled the
communications of the rest of the world. The remainder of NSA was similarly
organized. Despite other spy scandals, this system would remain unchanged until
well into the 1990s.

Vice
Admiral Laurence Hugh (Jack) Frost, a 1926 Annapolis graduate who once served
as chief of staff at NSA, replaced Samford. When he arrived, NSA's headquarters
at Fort Meade had grown to 8,000 people and was eating up a larger and larger
slice of the intelligence pie. By then the overall U.S. intelligence budget
reached $2 billion; the Department of Defense accounted for $1.4 billion, most
of which went to NSA. Thin and silver-haired, the admiral, soon after taking
office, proclaimed that NSA was a ship and ordered a 75-foot, 3,100-pound
flagpole installed with his personal flag so people would know that he was
aboard.

It was an
appropriate gesture. At the time, NSA was secretly building its own
eavesdropping navy to supplement its Sigint air force. As the air battles of
the 1950s claimed more and more lives, ferret ships began joining ferret
planes. Ships could also cover the southern hemisphere— South America and
sub-Saharan Africa—where NSA had almost no listening posts. Both areas were of
growing concern as the United States and Russia sought to expand their
influence throughout the developing world.

The
concept was not new. For years the Soviets had used a fleet of about forty
antenna-sprouting trawlers. They would bob just outside the three-mile
territorial limit and eavesdrop on defense installations along the east and
west coasts of the U.S. "The Soviets had a vast intelligence program which
included the use of Soviet trawlers," said former KGB major general Oleg
Kalugin, "and specially equipped scientific ships, so called, which
operated under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. They would
go to various places—the Atlantic, the Pacific and wherever they could. And
they would use the intelligence equipment ... to intercept electronic
communications and then ... break them."

President
Eisenhower authorized NSA's first signals intelligence ship on November 12,
1959. The
Samuel R. Aitken
would become the USS
Oxford.
Although
previously only cruisers had been named for cities, it was decided to make an
exception for eavesdropping vessels. "Oxford" was chosen because it
was found to be the commonest city name in the United States. The vessel was
also given the euphemistic designation "Auxiliary General Technical
Research" (AGTR) ship.

The
conversion work began in October 1960, just before the presidential elections.
At 441 feet long, with a beam of 57 feet and a displacement of 11,498 tons, the
Oxford
was large enough to house a sizable listening post. On September
11, 1961, Lieutenant Commander Howard R. Lund reported his ship ready for duty,
ostensibly for the Navy's Atlantic Service Force, and proceeded from New York
to the vessel's home port of Norfolk, Virginia.

The
Oxford
would be unlike any other ship ever sent to sea. To quickly get intercepts
from the ship to NSA, a unique sixteen-foot dish-shaped antenna was installed
on its fantail. On December 15, the
Oxford
became the first ship at sea
ever to receive a message bounced off the moon. "Signaling another first
in communications by the Navy," said the message from the Chief of Naval
Operations, "this message being sent to you from the U.S. Naval Research
Laboratory Field Station, Stump Neck, Maryland, via the moon."

A few
weeks later, the
Oxford
left Norfolk on its first operational cruise, an
eavesdropping sweep off eastern South America. After a brief visit to Colon,
Panama, it crossed the equator and sailed to Recife, Brazil; Montevideo,
Uruguay; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Along the way,
the ship successfully used its moon-bounce antenna to send information back to
Washington—another first.

In
addition to speed, the moon-bounce antenna also provided the ship with stealth.
Unlike the standard high-frequency communications, which were vulnerable to
foreign direction-finding antennas, the moon-bounce signal was virtually
undetectable because it used hard-to-intercept directional microwave signals.
The moon-bounce system was also immune to jamming. Ground stations for the system
were located at Cheltenham, Maryland, near NSA; Wahiawa, Hawaii; Sobe, Okinawa;
and Oakhanger, in the United Kingdom.

On June
20, 1962, Commander Thomas Avery Cosgrove took over as captain of the
Oxford.
Cosgrove was a "mustang," an officer who had previously served as
an enlisted man; he was "as rough as sandpaper," said Aubrey Brown,
one of the intercept operators on the ship. "He had tattoos all the way on
his arms down to his wrists. He had a tattoo around his neck. And he had the
language of a boatswain's mate."

About a
month later, on July 16, the ship set out for another four-month surveillance
mission down the South American coast. But three days later it received an
emergency message to set sail immediately for Cuba "in response to highest
priority intelligence requirements."

By the
summer of 1962, the shipping lanes between Russia and Cuba were beginning to
resemble a freeway during rush hour. On July 24, NSA reported "at least
four, and possibly five . . . Soviet passenger ships en route Cuba with a
possible 3,335 passengers on board." The passengers may well have been
Soviet military personnel brought to operate Soviet radar and weapons systems.
Over little more than a month, fifty-seven Soviet merchant ships visited
Havana. "In addition to the shipping increase," recalled Admiral
Robert Lee Dennison, who was in charge of the Atlantic fleet at the time,
"there were large numbers of Soviet-bloc military personnel prior to
August and then there was a buildup during August and September when nine passenger
ships arrived in Cuba with a total capacity of 20,000 passengers. But at the
time we didn't have any way of really confirming how many people were on board
these ships because they would disembark at night."

At the
same time, NSA began noticing increased use of deception. Ships leaving ports
in Russia listed destinations in the Far East and in Africa. But NSA, with its
network of giant elephant cages intercepting the vessels' daily broadcasts and
triangulating their positions, was able to track them as they crossed the
Atlantic en route to Cuba. NSA was also able to detect ships loading far less
cargo than their manifests called for, thus leaving a great deal of room for
weapons and military supplies. Thus when the new Soviet cargo ship
Beloretsk
arrived at Archangel in late May it was supposed to load about 7,800 tons
of lumber, but only 5,240 tons were actually put aboard. That cargo filled only
a third of the Norwegian-built ship's 14,150-ton capacity. "It is
therefore believed," concluded an NSA report, "that the
Beloretsk
may
be carrying a partial load of military cargo."

As the
summer wore on, the signals became more ominous. About forty miles off the
westernmost tip of Cuba, an antenna-packed ferret plane picked up the first
telltale sounds of Soviet airborne intercept radar. This meant that Cuban air
defense bases could now accurately target and shoot down U.S. aircraft flying
over or near their territory, thus increasing exponentially the risks of the
eavesdropping missions. That same day, intercept operators began hearing
Russian voices over Cuban internal communications links. "Comint sources
reveal Russian and non-Cuban voice activity on Cuban Revolutionary Air Force
tactical frequencies," said one report. Another troubling sign.

In May
1962, as the Soviet buildup in Cuba continued to look more menacing, Vice
Admiral Frost began touring listening posts in the Far East, including the
large Navy monitoring station at Kamiseya, Japan. The next month he was
suddenly booted from the agency and transferred to the Potomac River Naval
Command, a halfway house for admirals on the brink of retirement. Director for
less than two years, Frost bore the brunt of the various inquests into the
double defection of Martin and Mitchell. Because of that, and disputes with the
Pentagon, his cryptologic career was terminated prematurely. Many also felt
Frost had a
problem dealing with NSA personnel. "I thought Frost
was one of the least effective [NSA heads]," said former NSA research
chief Howard Campaigne. "I think his problems were communication
problems." Another former NSA official said Frost had trouble controlling
his anger. "I saw him chew out Frank Raven, Bill Ray [senior NSA
officials], and some Air Force brigadier general in a briefing," said Robert
D. Farley, a former NSA historian. "Just the finger-on-the-chest
bit."

Replacing
Frost was fifty-one-year-old Gordon Aylesworth Blake, an Air Force lieutenant
general. Blake knew what he was getting into; he had earlier run NSA's air arm,
the Air Force Security Service. As a sixteen-year-old, he slipped into West
Point under the age limit. "I hadn't been north of Minneapolis, east of
Chicago, south of Des Moines, or west of Sioux City," he recalled. "I
was pretty green."

Eventually
awarded his pilot's wings, Blake went on to communications school and was
assigned to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1939. On the morning of December 7, 1941,
he was on duty as the airfield operations officer, waiting to make sure a
returning flight of B-17 bombers was properly parked. They were due to arrive
at 8:00 A.M. from California. "So all of a sudden we hear this big
'karroppp,'
'"
said Blake. "I raced outside and here was a dive-bomber that had bombed a
big depot hangar at the south end of the hangar line. It pulled up and we could
see this red circle under the wing. Well, no guessing as to what the hell had
happened." Blake ran up to the control tower to warn the B-17s that were
due in and he eventually managed to land them safely. For his actions during
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he was awarded the Silver Star for
gallantry.

Blake knew
Frost was in trouble and was somewhat uneasy at moving in as his predecessor
was moving out. "Jack Frost was under some nebulous status because of the
Martin-Mitchell case," he said. "I very much felt badly about coming
in over his prostrate form, and he understood that."

Blake kept
Dr. Louis Tordella as deputy director and largely left to him the agency's most
secret operations. "It would be better for NSA and for those activities if
I left that to Tordella," Blake said. "And that was our working
relationship. So while I usually had a general knowledge of this compartment
and that compartment, I made no attempt to be really knowledgeable about it
and, therefore, just less involved security-wise. Maybe that's an odd view but
directors come and go and for them to become a repository of every last little
secret never struck me as being really very useful." Tordella was on his
way to an extraordinary reign as NSA's chief keeper of the secrets.

Sensing
the tremors of approaching war in the summer of 1941, Tordella, then a
thirty-year-old assistant professor of mathematics at Loyola University in
Chicago, one day walked into the nearby U.S. Fifth Army Headquarters and
volunteered his services. But after the professor explained that he held a
doctorate in mathematics, practiced crypt-analysis as a hobby, held an amateur
radio license, and wanted to serve, the Army major in charge could not be
bothered. Possibly thinking that the new recruit would be far more comfortable
with a box of chalk instead of bullets, he brushed him off with a sneer:
"When we want you, we'll draft you."