Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (19 page)

"We
were all listening for Russian communications, Cuban and Russian," said
Oxford
intercept operator Aubrey Brown. "The Cubans didn't take too kindly to
the idea of us sitting out there and doing this. So there was a game of
harassment that they played—they would send these gunboats out and you could
see the crew going to general quarters, you could see the guns being trained on
the ship. They take an attack position and then run a fake attack on the ship.
The people on the boats were standing behind the guns."

"Jesus
Christ," yelled one senior intercept operator. "It's war! Havana
harbor just went crypto." Until then, the routine broadcasts to ships
entering Havana harbor had been in the clear. Suddenly the broadcast became
gibberish. After a short while and further analysis, however, it was determined
that the nervous intercept operator had put the intercept tape in his machine
backwards. As tensions increased, McCone brought up with President Kennedy the
issue of the
Oxford's
safety. The CIA director was eventually given
permission to move it farther away, to about twenty miles.

Back in
the Elint section of the ship, the technicians would hear screeching as the
Cuban fire-control radar locked on them; then, MiGs would be launched. At the
same time, the U.S. listeners were eavesdropping on what the boats and the MiGs
were saying.

The
arrival of NSA civilians on the ship was wrapped in mystery. "You kind of
know things are getting a little more agitated because over in Key West you
would pick up a couple of guys from NSA who will come out and do three weeks of
special duty," said Brown. "And they've got some kind of assignment
that no one will talk about. They come in with special recorders and they put
them in the racks and they do their stuff and they leave."

Because
NSA was unable to break the Soviet cipher system, one of the special missions
involved sending someone to the
Oxford
with special equipment to try to
capture the radiation emitted from Soviet crypto machines. These signals—known
in NSA as Tempest emissions—contained deciphered information and thus would be
extremely valuable. But to collect those signals, the ship had to get very
close to the Russian station. "We took the ship in pretty close. We
usually stayed out eight miles, but this time we went in to around four
miles," said Brown. "There was a Russian communications station there
that was in communication with Moscow, and they were trying to pick up the
Tempest radiation from this crypto device. If they could get the Tempest
radiation, they [the NSA] had the key to the universe then."

The
intercept operators were also looking for sharp "noise spikes," which
could offer clues as to rotor settings on older crypto machines. "The
codebreakers were having a tough time with this code," said Max Buscher, a
Sigint operator on the
Oxford
during the crisis. "They thought that
if we got in close, if the encrypting device was electromechanical, we might
pick up some noise spikes; that would be a clue as to how the machine was stepping
with its rotors. We monitored that twenty-four hours a day."

At NSA
headquarters, the Cuba Watch team was trying to piece together the military
order of battle in Cuba. "We had constructed a Cuban air defense
system," said Parish. "We really had not identified the SAM
communications and so on." Along the rim of the Atlantic Ocean, NSA's
listening posts and elephant cages were put on special alert. As Navy ships
began leaving port to get into position to enforce a blockade, it was critical
to know the location, speed, and cargo of Soviet ships now crossing the
Atlantic en route to Cuba.

Even more
important was any indication of Soviet submarines. In the blockhouses at the
center of the massive antennas, intercept operators scanned the frequency
spectrum hoping for a hit. Once a signal was captured, listening posts on both
sides of the Atlantic would immediately transmit the information to the net
control center at Cheltenham, Maryland. There, technicians would triangulate
the exact positions of the ships and subs and pass the information on to
analysts in NSA. It was feared that once a blockade was announced, the Russians
might attempt to smuggle nuclear warheads or other weapons to Cuba under the
American ships patrolling the restricted area. On a wall-size plotting board in
the Merchant Shipping Section, small magnetic ships would be moved as the
positions were reported by Cheltenham. Photographs would then be taken of the
board for inclusion in the next morning's intelligence report, which would be sent
to the White House.

In late
September, four Soviet submarines had slipped into the Atlantic from the
Barents Sea. The F-class attack subs were the top of the line, capable of
launching nuclear-tipped torpedoes. NSA had been keeping track of the movements
of an oil-resupply vessel, the
Terek,
which was suspected of providing
support to the subs; wherever the
Terek
went, the Soviet submarines were
thought to be close by. By October the
Terek
and the submarines were
halfway across the Atlantic, an unusual move by a navy that usually keeps its
submarines close to home. American intelligence feared that the four were the
vanguard for a Soviet submarine facility in Cuba. Another vessel of great
interest to NSA, traveling in the general vicinity of the
Terek,
was the
electronic eavesdropping ship
Shkval,
which was also suspected of
supporting the subs while at the same time collecting intelligence on U.S.
ships in the area.

On Sunday,
October 21, the
Oxford
made a grim discovery. "I was at work and
all of a sudden there were people running all over the place," said
intercept operator Aubrey Brown. "They're distraught, they're preoccupied,
and they're trying to send out Flash messages and everything's going
crazy." (Seldom used, Flash messages have the highest priority; the
designation is reserved for dire war-related messages.) Most of the activity
was coming from behind the cipher-locked door to the aft Elint space. Inside
the darkened room, crammed with receivers, six-foot-tall 3M tape recorders, and
an assortment of eerie green screens, technicians hovered around the flickering
scope of the WLR-l X-band receiver.

They had
just picked up the screeching sounds from a troubling new radar system in Cuba,
and they wanted to be sure it was what they suspected. Again and again they
measured the width of the pulses—the size of the spikes on the scope. Holding
on to stopwatches that dangled from their necks, they clicked them on and off
to time the interval between the
woop
sounds, giving them the radar's
scan rate. Once they were sure of the signal's makeup, they checked the NSA's
highly classified TEXTA (Technical Extracts of Traffic Analysis) Manual and
confirmed its identity.

"One
of our T Branchers [Elint operators] intercepted one of the radars going on
line for the first time," said Max Buscher. "And they could tell by
the parameters that it was a radar associated with an offensive missile system.
This was flashed to NSA. Six hours later, a jet helicopter came down and
lowered a rope and they wanted the tape— they didn't just take our word for it,
the NSA wanted the tape."

Early the
next day, October 22, NSA had more bad news: at least five Soviet missile
regiments would soon become operational in Cuba. Each regiment would have eight
missile launchers and sixteen missiles. Thus, Cuba would have the potential to
launch a first salvo of forty missiles, and a refire capability of another
forty.

Later that
morning, at a National Security Council meeting, McCone discussed the
Terek
and
other up-to-the-minute intelligence on Soviet shipping. The
Poltava,
he
said, was due to arrive in Cuba in about five days, and its cargo was so
arranged as to make it clear that long cylinders were on board.

At 1:00
P.M. the Strategic Air Command began to initiate "quietly and
gradually" a partial airborne alert and the dispersal of bombers to air
bases around the country. At the same time, the Navy began to quietly evacuate
dependents, by ship and air, from the American base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Within nine hours, all 2,810 people had been safely removed.

That
evening at seven, President Kennedy addressed the nation, announcing that
"unmistakable evidence" had established the presence of Soviet MRBM
and ICBM sites and nuclear-capable bombers in Cuba. He then said that he was
ordering imposed on Cuba a "strict quarantine on all offensive military
equipment." Finally, he warned the Soviet government that the United
States will "regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any
nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United
States, requiring a full retaliatory response against the Soviet Union."

As the
president spoke, U.S. military forces in much of the world were put on alert.
Polaris nuclear submarines sailed to preassigned stations at sea. Twenty-two
interceptor aircraft went airborne in the event of military action from Cuba.
"I had the first watch when Kennedy made his speech," said Hal
Parish. "I was briefed to expect the possibility of a very high level of
flight activity over Cuba that evening—to expect almost anything. I was briefed
on lots of airplanes. Not a thing flew that evening. We didn't launch
anything." He added, "It was a very frightening and scary experience.
The only time in the thirty years I worked for the government when I was scared
about the world situation, and I was really scared."

On the
Oxford,
in the eye of the hurricane, many of the crew were stunned. "I was
thinking, Jesus Christ, we're going to blow up the world here," said
acting operations officer Keith Taylor who was down in the Sigint spaces.
"After the president's announcement there was shock on the ship,"
said intercept operator Aubrey Brown. "What the hell was going to happen.
Next time they come out they will put a torpedo up our ass."

Also
worried about the
Oxford
was John McCone, who ordered the ship pulled
back. "Right after the announcement they moved us out to twelve
miles," said Brown. "We were then moved out to a twenty-five-mile
track offshore." Still worried, officials instructed the Oxford to do its eavesdropping
safely off Fort Lauderdale.

But much
of the mission's work could not be done from that distance. "You could run
some of the operations from Fort Lauderdale but not the bulk of it," said
Brown. "You could do all the Morse code stuff but the Elint you couldn't
do. . . . The next day they decided to send us back to Cuba." Brown added,
"You could get some microwave sitting off Havana depending on where it is
coming from and where it is going."

Within
hours of Kennedy's address, intercepts began flowing into NSA. At 10:12 P.M.,
an NSA listening post intercepted a Flash precedence message sent from the Soviet
eavesdropping trawler
Shkval,
near the submarine patrol, to the cargo
vessel
Alantika.
The
Shkval
then sent another message to the
Alantika
for retransmission to Murmansk, the home port of the submarines. Although
they were unable to read the encrypted message, the U.S. intercept operators
noted the significance of the Flash precedence in the report they quickly
transmitted to Fort Meade. "This type of precedence rarely observed,"
said the intercept report. "Significance unknown." The network of
listening posts was able to pinpoint the
Shkval
a few hundred miles
south of Bermuda; the
Alantika
was about 150 miles off the U.S. East
Coast, near Philadelphia.

In the
early morning hours of October 23, other Soviet ships likewise began calling
for instructions. The Soviet cargo vessel
Kura,
just off Havana harbor,
relayed an urgent message to Moscow through another Soviet vessel, the
Nikolaj
Burdenko,
which was approaching the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Russian
passenger ship
Nikolaevsk,
approaching the eastern end of Cuba, sent
Moscow a worried message: U.S. war vessel Nr. 889 was following her on a
parallel course. Throughout the Caribbean and the North Atlantic, whenever a
Soviet ship sent a weather request, indicating its position, an NSA listening
post picked it up and noted its location.

At NSA, as
the world awaited Moscow's response to the U.S. ultimatum, a report was issued
indicating that the Soviets were taking ever greater control of the skies over
Cuba. Sixty-three MiG pilots took to the air in a single day, and of that
number more than half spoke Russian or spoke Spanish with a heavy Slavic
accent. Around the world, NSA listening posts were ordered to install armed
patrols around their facilities. Even in tiny Cape Chiniak, on Kodiak Island in
Alaska, the threat was taken seriously. Communications Technician Pete Azzole
was watching the messages rattle in the Communications Center when his eyes
grew wide: "A Flash precedence message began revealing itself line by
line," he recalled. "My eyes were fixed on the canary yellow paper,
watching each character come to life." The more the message revealed, the
more nervous Azzole became. It read:

1.
                
A NUCLEAR ATTACK HAS BEEN LAUNCHED AGAINST THE EAST COAST OF THE
UNITED STATES ...

After a
few agonizing seconds, Azzole realized that the message was a practice drill.

At the
White House, President Kennedy was deeply troubled over the possibility of
nuclear retaliation against the United States if there was a strike against
Cuba. A Pentagon official told him that the area covered by the
1,100-mile-range Soviet missiles involved 92 million people. Fallout shelters
were available, though not equipped, for about 40 million. When Kennedy asked
what emergency steps could be taken, the official was less than encouraging. Shelter
signs could be put up and food could be repositioned. But McCone concluded that
whatever was done would involve a great deal of publicity and public alarm.