Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (57 page)

"At
the end of World War II," Denholm told General Bruce Palmer, Jr.,
"NSA was about 99 percent military. Now at NSA within the top two thousand
spaces, you will find that there are perhaps five percent military. . . . There
are about thirteen military men among the three services out of about 275 supergrades
[a supergrade is the civilian equivalent of an Army general] that are running
the show. So the military has gradually disappeared from the higher echelons at
NSA." Denholm concluded, in the not-for-NSA's-ears briefing, "I fear
that in about five years there probably will be no more military at NSA. All
the key NSA slots are disappearing."

By the
early 1970s, with the war in Vietnam winding down, the war within NSA for
control of the dwindling budget heated up. The question was whether the civilians
or the military would be in charge of the vault. In what one former NSA
official termed a "declaration of war," a strategy paper was
submitted to Director Gayler, arguing that that person should be a civilian.

The paper
was co-written by Milton S. Zaslow, then the assistant deputy director for
operations and the second most powerful civilian in the agency. It argued that
because the civilian leadership at NSA represent continuity, civilians were in
a better position to determine the needs of the Sigint community. Said the
former NSA official quoted above: "The strategy paper was written saying,
'We're the ones who know all about this stuff, we'll control it and we'll tell
you what you can have, and we'll see that you get the support you need when you
need it.' "

But the
military side argued that since it operated the listening posts, the aircraft,
and the submarines, it should have final authority over the budget.

Eventually
Gayler had to make the choice—and the decision went to the military. In the
view of one of the civilians: "He wasn't a ballplayer until the end. From
what I saw, he [Gayler] was really good for NSA, up until the end, and then I
think he sold out; he went along with the military." Whatever his motive,
Gayler's move was handsomely rewarded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On August
24, 1972, after three years as America's chief electronic spymaster, he was
promoted to full admiral and awarded one of the choicest assignments in the
military: Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), based in Hawaii. Gayler's
ascent to four-star rank and promotion to bigger and better things marked a
turning point in the history of the NSA. Before Gayler, the NSA directorship
was generally acknowledged to be a final resting place, a dead-end job from
which there was no return. Beginning with Gayler, however, NSA frequently
became a springboard to four-star rank and major military assignments.

Gayler's
successor was Lieutenant General Samuel C. Phillips, an Air Force officer who,
while seconded to NASA, directed the Apollo space program from its infancy
through the lunar landing in 1969.

By the
time Phillips arrived at NSA, in August 1972, American fighter pilots in
Vietnam were being shot down in ever increasing numbers. Earlier, NSA had
succeeded in intercepting a weak beacon transponder signal transmitted from a
small spiral antenna on the tail of the Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile.
This antenna transmitted the SA-2's navigational data back to the launch site.
"It came on thirty seconds after the missile's launch," said one
former NSA official, "so that the launch site can track the missile and
steer it close enough to where its own homing system will lock on to the target
and go in for the final kill."

Once such
a signal had been captured and dissected by NSA, however, technicians were able
to secretly jam the signal, sending the missiles off course and saving the
lives of hundreds of pilots. But in 1972 the North Vietnamese realized
something was very wrong and called in the Soviets to help correct the problem.
Shortly thereafter the frequencies were changed and the SA-2 missiles once
again began hitting their mark.

Despite
months of effort, intercept operators were not able to recapture the faint
signal. Then, in late 1972, someone at NSA headquarters recalled a pet project
by a Navy cryptologic officer. Using spare, off-the-shelf equipment, he had put
together a unique signal acquisition system. Within twenty-four hours, the
officer, John Arnold, was sent off to Southeast Asia with his experimental
machine and assigned to the USS
Long Beach.
Arnold's machine worked
better than anyone could have anticipated. Once again, they were able to
intercept the elusive SA-2 signal, and the hit-kill ratio switched back to
America's favor. "They dumped more than a million dollars in other systems
and platforms trying to find the answer and they couldn't," said Arnold.

By 1972,
NSA also began "remoting" some of its more hazardous operations.
Rather than having intercept operators sit in front of row after row of
receivers, spinning dials to find enemy voices, now the agency could do much of
its eavesdropping by computer.

Codenamed
Explorer, the system involved preprogrammed computers and receivers that would
quickly scan for targeted and unusual frequencies carrying voice and coded
communications. Once located, they would be uplinked to an aircraft or
satellite and then, through a series of relays, downlinked to NSA or some other
safe location away from the fighting. There, translators, codebreakers,
computers, and traffic analysts could dissect the signals. A similar system,
codenamed Guardrail, was established in Europe. In Guardrail, an aircraft was
used as a relay to move Sigint from the front lines to analysts in the rear.

Explorer
was particularly useful in unusually dangerous areas— for example, just south
of the DMZ. To capture those communications, the system was set up on several
remote firebases located on high and isolated hills. One was Firebase Sarge and
another was known as A-4. Although Explorer was highly automated, several
people were nevertheless needed to maintain the equipment and keep it from
being vandalized, a very hazardous job given the locations.

The
firebases just south of the DMZ were the most isolated and dangerous listening
posts in the world. There, intercept operators were close enough to the dragon
to count its teeth. Occasionally they would also feel its sting. A-4 sat on the
top of a steep mountain near Con Thien. "From A-4 you could see the middle
of the DMZ, it was that close," said an intercept operator stationed
there. "It was the furthest northernmost outpost the Americans held in
Vietnam. The DMZ
looked like rolling hills; a no-man's-land with a river
through it and scrub brush and that was about it for miles. There was no fence.
The river separated it and over the river was a bridge and the NVA flew a big
flag over it with a red star and you could see it through binoculars. We used
to watch them infiltrate, you could watch them come across. At the time there
were no other Americans there."

Working in
a tiny underground bunker, the handful of intercept operators pinpointed enemy
infiltrators, artillery units moving toward the border, and mobile
surface-to-air missiles through voice and coded intercepts. "In A-4 we
were in a bunker underground," said the intercept operator. "They had
the codes broken, they could pick up the firing designators. When the North
Vietnamese got on the radio to open up the guns or the rocket attack, they
would use designators. And the Americans knew the designators, so we would know
when we were about to get shelled and we would go back underground so we didn't
get blown up."

The
concrete bunker was about ten feet underground and held only about five to
seven intercept operators. Five worked the intercept equipment while the other
two slept. They would take turns and they were all volunteers. Nearby was
another bunker containing the NSA Explorer remote intercept equipment.

In early
1972, the intercept operators at A-4 began getting indications of something
larger than the usual infiltration or harassment taking place across the
border. "We thought there was going to be an invasion, and nobody was
really listening," said one intercept operator who was there at the time.
"That was January, February, beginning of March 1972. There was just too
much buildup of activity above the DMZ for it not to happen. We were reporting
that to the higher-ups. But in my personal opinion, it fell on deaf ears
because at that time there weren't any Americans except for the intelligence
people and then the few American advisers who were up there."

Further to
the west, at Firebase Sarge, indications of a major attack were also becoming
more numerous. There, the only Sigint personnel were two Army specialists,
Bruce Crosby, Jr., and Gary Westcott, assigned to maintain the Explorer
equipment contained in a bunker. The only other American was Marine Major Walter
Boomer, who was an adviser to South Vietnamese forces assigned to the firebase.
Earlier in March, Boomer had warned General Giai, the commanding general of the
South Vietnamese Army's 3rd Division, of his deep concern about the steady
increase in enemy activity in the area. He told Giai that he felt that
something significant was going to take place soon. The general listened but
said there was little he could do.

To the
south, at Cam Lo, a secret American facility monitored the DMZ through
ground-surveillance devices planted throughout the zone. During most of March,
the number of trucks detected crossing the DMZ had tripled, and the monitors
recorded both wheeled and tracked vehicle traffic, a worrisome sign. By the end
of the month, the monitors were recording heavy traffic even during daylight
hours, something that had never happened before.

The bad news came on Good Friday, March 30, 1972. Just before noon
on Firebase Sarge, Major Boomer passed on to his headquarters some disturbing
news. "Shortly after daylight the NVA began to shell us here at
Sarge," he said. "The NVA's fire is as accurate and as heavy as we
have ever experienced up here. We're all okay now, but there is probably a big
battle coming our way. ... It looks like this could be their big push."

It was Tet
all over again. The North Vietnamese Army had launched their largest offensive
in four years, and U.S. and South Vietnamese forces were just as unprepared as
they had been the last time. In fact, the U.S. military command in Saigon, 350
miles south, refused to believe a major attack was in progress even after it
had begun. Over 30,000 well-armed soldiers supported by more than 400 armored
fighting vehicles, tanks, mobile missile launchers, and long-range cannons
poured over the DMZ. Crossing the Ben Hai River, they knifed into the South's
Quang Tri Province and turned the lonely firebases, like islands in the sky,
into shooting galleries.

Up on
Firebase Sarge, as the earth rolled from the violent assault, Boomer ordered
Westcott and Crosby to remain in the NSA Explorer bunker and keep in radio
contact with him and also with the listening post at A-4. Explorer was housed
in an aluminum hut that also contained eight pieces of NSA crypto equipment.
Around the hut was a bunker made of several rows of sandbags and a steel roof
covered with another five feet of additional sandbags. For ventilation there
was a window on one side.

Below
Sarge, Soviet 130mm guns, the size of telephone poles, let loose with
boulderlike shells. The rattle of small-arms fire followed and then the heavy
crump
of 122mm rockets raining down. Suddenly both A-4 and Boomer lost contact
with Westcott and Crosby. Shortly after noon, a rocket scored a direct hit,
crashing through the window in the NSA Explorer bunker. The two intercept
operators were killed instantly and the bunker became a crematorium, burning
for days. More than a decade after the first Sigint soldier died in Vietnam,
two of the last were killed.

With A-4
also under heavy assault, the intercept operators were ordered to begin
destroying Explorer and the rest of the crypto equipment and files. Above each
of the sensitive devices were thermite plates for quick destruction. The plates
were electrically activated and were wired together to a switch on the outside
of the hut. Each thermite plate— about a foot wide and an inch thick—was
designed to burn at the solar-like temperature of 35,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
"The hut would burn for a couple of days before all the metal essentially
turned to ash," said one of the soldiers who installed the destruction
devices. "Once the thermites reached full temperature and the hut started
burning no one could possibly survive and in the end there would be nothing
left, absolutely nothing." Within a day of what became known as the Easter
Offensive, there was no evidence that NSA had ever been at A-4, just ashes. The
war was over and the United States had lost.

On January
27, 1973, the United States and Vietnam signed a cease-fire agreement. At 7:45
A.M., fifteen minutes before the cease-fire took effect, the USS
Turner Joy,
which had helped launch America's misguided adventure, sailed off the Cam
Lo—Cua Viet River outlet and senselessly fired off the last salvo of the war.

Six months
later, after barely a year in office, Samuel Phillips left NSA to head up the
Air Force Space and Missile Organization. The man chosen to finish out his
assignment was Lieutenant General Lew Allen, Jr. Tall and professorial-looking,
with rimless glasses and a few wisps of fine dark hair across his crown, Allen,
an expert in space reconnaissance, arrived at NSA following an assignment of
only five and a half months with the CIA.