Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (88 page)

Once
completed, the examiner's report is forwarded to quality control for an
independent review of accuracy and analysis and to ensure that all issues have
been covered. From there it travels to the Clearance Division for adjudication.
The polygraph examiner does not make any clearance decisions. His or her sole
purpose is to verify the validity of the information being provided during the
interview and to resolve any matters that are causing the person difficulty in
passing the test.

A unique
insight into the NSA polygraph program comes from an analysis of 20,511
applicants between 1974 and 1979. Of those, 695 (3.4 percent) admitted to the
commission of a felony. In nearly all cases the perpetrator had gone
undetected. The admissions included murder, armed robbery, forcible rape,
burglary, arson, embezzlement, hit-and-run driving with personal injury, thefts
of expensive items or large amounts of money, smuggling, and wholesale selling
of illegal drugs.

One person
who applied to NSA proved to be a fugitive who, during questioning under the
polygraph, admitted firing a rifle into his estranged wife's home in an attempt
to murder her. Another confessed to firing his shotgun at six people, and
hitting all of them. He had been charged with attempted murder but not tried
because of lack of evidence. Still another told of setting fire to the trailer
in which his ex-wife and their child lived. A veteran admitted to a polygraph
operator that while in Vietnam he had murdered a young girl. On a later
occasion he stabbed a stranger in the face with a knife in an argument over
some beer. And an applicant for an engineering position—who was employed as an
engineer by another government agency—blurted out that he had shot and wounded
his second wife and that his present wife was missing under unusual
circumstances, which he would not explain. He also suddenly declared that his
engineering degree was phony.

Even
espionage has turned up during polygraph examinations. One applicant with
access to Top Secret/Codeword intelligence who was about to retire from the
military described making several visits to the Soviet embassy to make
arrangements to defect to the Soviet Union. The Russians took copies of his
classified documents and when they found out he had applied to NSA for
employment, they encouraged him to continue.

Another
applicant, who had access to classified information while in the military,
confessed that he would sell classified information to a foreign intelligence
service if he could get enough money. And one person looking for a job at NSA
eventually admitted that much of his background was falsified and that he had
worked as a scientific adviser to the chief of a foreign military intelligence
agency.

Most
significantly, the NSA study indicated serious questions about highly cleared
military personnel assigned to NSA's Central Security Service. At the time,
service members were not subject to the polygraph. During the five-year period
of the survey, 2,426 of these SCI-cleared military personnel applied for
employment with NSA as civilians. Of that number, thirteen admitted that either
they themselves or someone they knew had been involved in espionage. Another
twenty-five told of passing classified information to Communists or terrorists.

In the
early 1990s NSA became the first intelligence or defense agency to completely
computerize its polygraph program—the first major change in the art of
polygraphy since 1940. According to NSA officials, the computerized polygraph
equipment was found to be more accurate than conventional methods because it
could record signals at maximum sensitivity. The computer also allows the
examiner to change how the data are displayed on the screen without changing
the base data, thus protecting the validity of the test.

The agency
is currently working on ways to almost completely eliminate all human
involvement in the polygraph process. In the near future an Orwellian computer,
programmed with an individual's history, will ask the questions, analyze the
answers, and decide whether a person is lying or telling the truth.

In 1991
the Office of Security Services, working with the Mathematics Branch of the
Research and Sigint Technology Division, issued a contract aimed at elevating
the computer from simply a passive display to an active analyst. The lead
contractor on the project, Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics
Laboratory, was able to develop a system called Polygraph Assisted Scoring
System (PASS) using a briefcase-sized AXCITON computerized polygraph. Unlike
evaluation by humans, which sometimes took days or even weeks to produce a
final decision, the computerized procedure finishes within two or three minutes
of the exam. Using both a history of the individual's past tests and his or her
own physiological makeup, the computer comes up with a statistical probability
concerning the meaning of test results.

Although
with the PASS system examiners would still make the final determination, their
future does not look bright. Early testing indicates that computerized analysis
is more accurate and produces fewer inconclusive results than
human-administered tests. According to one NSA document, "In the near
future, it may even be possible for the computer to ask the test
questions—eliminating any possibility of the examiner's affecting the test
results."

But
despite the growing dependence on the polygraph, the box is far from
infallible, as Norman Ansley, chief of NSA's Polygraph Division during the
1980s, once admitted. Asked whether someone addicted to drugs and alcohol could
beat the box, his answer was "Possibly," if that person "had
practiced dissociation by thinking of something else." Which is precisely
why many both inside and outside government distrust the machines.
"Polygraphing has been described as a 'useful, if unreliable'
investigative tool," said the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in
1999. Given such questionable data, the panel asked CIA director George J.
Tenet and FBI director Louis J. Freeh to assess "alternative technologies
to the polygraph." The newest agency to use the polygraph is the Department
of Energy, in its nuclear weapons labs. One scientist noted in the DoE employee
newsletter that the expected error rate is about 2 percent. "In our
situation," he said, "that's 100 innocent people out of 5,000 whose
reputations and careers would be blemished."

After the
polygraph, NSA applicants undergo a battery of psychological tests to determine
their suitability for both employment and access to the agency's highly
classified materials. A clinical psychologist interviews 90 percent of all
applicants.

All the information
obtained about an applicant from the polygraph, psychological testing, and the
full field investigation is then put together and brought before NSA's
Applicant Review Panel, comprising representatives from the personnel, medical,
and security offices. The board examines each applicant on what the agency
calls the "total person" principle and either gives the candidate a
thumbs-up or refers the case to the director of personnel for a "We regret
to inform you" letter.

The second
day of the two-day program for job applicants consists mainly of more
briefings, including a security briefing and an unclassified operational
briefing. A few of the most desirable prospects may get a tour of an
operational area. This, however, requires the sanitizing of the entire
area—everything classified must be removed—so it is seldom offered.

Following
their forty-eight hours at FANX, the recruits head back to school to finish
their last semester and, in the meantime, to sweat out the background
investigation.

For many
years, NSA security officials rated homosexuality near the top of its list of
security problems to watch out for.

In 1960, during the Eisenhower administration, irrational fear of
homosexuality extended right into the Oval Office. "The Soviets seem to
have a list of homosexuals," Attorney General William P. Rogers nervously
told Eisenhower during a Top Secret National Security Council meeting. What
really concerned him, he said, was "the possibility that there is an
organized group of such people." Rogers, who would later become President
Richard Nixon's secretary of state, apparently feared a worldwide conspiracy of
homosexuals. "The Russians had entrapped one individual," he told the
president, "who, in his confession, had stated that there was an
international group of homosexuals."

A month
before, two NSA cryptologists had appeared before cameras on a stage in Moscow,
asked for political asylum, and confessed the agency's deepest secrets like
sinners at a revival meeting. It was the worst scandal in NSA's history. All
evidence pointed clearly to ideology as the reason for William Martin and
Bernon Mitchell's drastic action. But once it was discovered that one of the
men had engaged in some barnyard experimentation as a youth, sexuality was
quickly seized on as the real cause of the defections. According to documents
obtained for
Body of Secrets,
the fear of homosexuals caused by the
men's defection became pathological within the White House. The FBI secretly
drew up a nationwide list of everyone it thought might be gay and, in a
throwback to McCarthyism, Eisenhower ordered them blacklisted.

At the
National Security Council meeting described above, Treasury Secretary Robert
Anderson was also concerned. He asked "how good a list we had of
homosexuals." J. Edgar Hoover replied that his bureau "did have a
list and that local authorities notified federal authorities when they obtained
such information." Eisenhower then ordered a secret, systematic
blacklisting of the listed individuals throughout the federal government.
"Such lists," he said, "should be given to someone who would
have responsibility for watching to ensure that such individuals were not
employed by other Government agencies. Everyone who applied for a job should be
fingerprinted. Then if you had a fingerprint and an indication that the
individual had been rejected for such reasons [as homosexuality], you would
have a basis for preventing his future employment." Hoover agreed.
"This was a useful idea." Eisenhower concluded the meeting with the
comment, "It was difficult to get rid of such people once they were
employed and that the time to catch them was when they came into the
Government."

The harsh
attitude of the White House translated into a massive purge at NSA. Anyone who
showed even the slightest gay tendencies, whether that person was actively
homosexual or not, was out. Dozens were fired or forced to resign. The fear
would last for decades. But by 2001, the attitude had changed considerably. The
most striking example is the authorized formation within the walls of NSA of
GLOBE, the group for gay, lesbian, and bisexual employees, whose regular
monthly meetings, in NSA offices, are advertised in the
NSA Newsletter.

Less than
a year after the Berlin Wall crumbled, the first post—Cold War conflict
erupted. Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, U.S. and coalition forces
launched the Desert Storm operation against Saddam Hussein. As the smoke began
to clear, NSA director Studeman rated the performance of U.S. spy agencies
during the conflict as mixed—except for what he called the excellent monitoring
of sanction-busters. The principal problem, he said, was converting a former
friend into an enemy almost overnight. "Clearly during the Iran-Iraq
war," Studeman said, "we viewed Iraq as an ally. So, Iraq was an area
where we didn't have a lot of basic collection, or a lot of idea of the depth
and breadth of the Iraqi capabilities. We had that on a monitoring basis, but
few would call it in-depth knowledge of the target, the kind you would want to
have if you go to war. We simply didn't have that."

Studeman
also said that because Saddam Hussein had been an intelligence partner, NSA was
now at a disadvantage. "Having had about four years' or more worth of U.S.
delivering intelligence to it with regard to Iran's conduct of the war, Iraq
had a substantial knowledge and sensitivity of our capabilities in the area of
imaging and other intelligence collection methods such as signals intelligence.
If you go back to the fundamental principles of intelligence, we had already
failed on the first count. That is, our security had been penetrated because we
were dealing with this target to whom we had spent so many years displaying
what our intelligence capabilities were. Add the fact that Iraq is a very
secretive country itself and places a great premium on security, and you then
have a target that is probably the most denial-and-deception-oriented target
that the U.S. has ever faced. It is a country that goes out of its way to
create a large number of barriers to allowing any Western penetration of its
capabilities and intentions."

Especially
troublesome during the war were such areas as intelligence
"fusion"—bringing all the U.S. intelligence organizations
together—and information management. A key problem for NSA was getting
intelligence from the intercept operators to the codebreakers to the analysts
to the commanders in desert tents in time for it to be useful.
"Essentially, from the threat of the invasion of Kuwait in late July until
the outbreak of hostilities on 15 January," Studeman said, "the time
was spent creating the environment for collection, processing and analysis, and
the connection between the national side of it and the theater side."

As troops
began boarding planes for the trip back home, Studeman looked ahead to the long
decade leading up to the new century. "The world of the future is going to
be an entirely different intelligence world," he said. By 1990 the fat
years for NSA and its partners had come to an end. The Cold War had been won
and it was time for the soldiers to return home. Suddenly a group that had
known only growth was faced with cutbacks, budget slashing, and layoffs.