The Secret Sentry (23 page)

The best potential source available to the U.S. intelligence community as to whether the Soviets intended to invade Czechoslo
vaki a came from the super-secret joint CIA-NSA listening post located on the tenth floor of the American embassy in Moscow
that had been intercepting the telephone calls of key Politburo members since at least the early 1960s. There was also a separate
intercept operation hidden inside the British embassy in Moscow. Both sites monitored a wide range of radio and telephone
communications inside the Russian capital, including KGB, GRU, Soviet government, and police radio messages, as well as the
car phone conversations of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and his successors.
⁶⁰

Despite the public disclosure of the Moscow embassy SIGINT operation by the
New York Times
in 1966, the Russian leaders continued to talk away on their car phones in the years that followed, and the CIA and NSA continued
to tape and translate them as fast as they came in. The highly sensitive intelligence reports derived from these intercepts,
code-named Gamma Guppy, were deemed to be so secret that they were distributed to a very select few in the entire U.S. government.
But Gamma Guppy proved not to be a definitive source on the question of Czech oslo vakia. According to Ambassador David Fischer,
who in 1968 was a senior intelligence analyst at the State Department:

We had an interesting system called Guppy. Guppy was very compartmentalized special intelligence. It was basically intercepts
of the mobile phone lines of the Russian leadership in Moscow. The reason I tell this story is that on the eve of the invasion
of Czech o slovak i a, the then head of the Warsaw Pact, Marshal [Andrei Antonovich] Grechko, had gone around to all the Warsaw
Pact members to canvas them whether or not they were going to invade. And when he arrived back at Moscow airport, we were
able to intercept a telephone call Grechko made to Brezhnev. The problem was they were no fools and spoke in a word code—you
know, the moon is red or some silly phrase—and we didn’t have the faintest idea whether that meant the invasion was on or
off.
⁶¹

Back in Washington, an accumulation of new SIGINT convinced NSA intelligence analysts that the Soviets intended to invade
Czech oslo vaki a. On August 19, NSA issued an alert message to the entire U.S. intelligence community that warned that all
signs appearing in intercepted Soviet radio traffic indicated that the Russians were about to invade Czechoslovakia. Later
that morning, NSA official David McManis, who was serving at the time as the deputy chief of the White House Situation Room,
sent a brief note to National Security Advisor Rostow, telling him that “the invasion they both thought would happen appeared
to be imminent.”
⁶²

The warnings out of NSA proved to be correct. A few hours later, shortly after midnight on the morning of August 20, a fresh
batch of intercepts re-vealed that fifteen to sixteen Soviet combat divisions and supporting Warsaw Pact forces had crossed
the border into Czechoslovak ia. In a matter of hours they had occupied most of the largest cities and almost all key government
military installations inside Czechoslovakia.
⁶³

The October Surprise

One of the great secrets of the Vietnam War era was that some of NSA’s best SIGINT product came from the agency’s ability
to read virtually all of the high-level military and diplomatic traffic of the government of South Vietnam as early as the
October 1963 coup d’état that overthrew South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem.
⁶⁴

NSA’s intelligence continued to improve as the Vietnam War intensified, largely because NSA had supplied all of the South
Vietnamese government’s communications and encryption equipment to begin with. The most important SIGINT materials coming
out of NSA were decrypts of the cable traffic between South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu and his ambassador in Washington,
Bui Diem, which covered the full gamut of U.S.–South Vietnamese relations. By the fall of 1968, these NSA decrypts were deemed
to be so sensitive that they were placed in a separate reporting compartment designated Gamma Gout, which limited access to
only a select few officials in Washington. Thanks to the NSA decrypts, President Johnson knew virtually everything about the
South Vietnamese government’s attitudes toward the Paris peace talks with the North Vietnamese, as well as President Thieu’s
negotiating positions.
⁶⁵

It was no secret that an unwilling and angry Thieu felt that Johnson had forced his government to participate in the Paris
talks. But Thieu knew that since Johnson was not running for reelection, Thieu stood a pretty good chance of being able to
abandon the talks, depending on who won the election in November— the Democrat Hubert Humphrey or the Republican Party’s candidate,
Richard Nixon.

A little more than a week before the U.S. presidential election, between October 23 and 27, NSA intercepted several “eyes
only” messages from Diem to Thieu. Senior members of the Nixon entourage, Diem reported, including longtime Republican political
activist Anna Chennault, who was the vice chair of the Republican National Finance Committee, had asked that Thieustand firm
until after the election, when a Republican administration could offer the South Vietnamese government more favorable terms
than an administration headed by Humphrey. The Nixon campaign didn’t want Thieu to do anything that might help Humphrey get
elected, so Nixon wanted Thieu to stall the Paris peace talks by not attending until after the election.
⁶⁶

One of Johnson’s senior aides, Arthur Krim, recalled in an interview, “The President told me very much off the record . .
. they had this cable that Madame [Anna] Chennault had sent I guess it was [Nguyen Van] Thieu or somebody in South Vietnam
saying, ‘Don’t cooperate in Paris. It will be helpful to Humphrey.’ I’m not giving you the words, but the gist was wait for
Nixon.”
⁶⁷

The substance of these NSA decrypts was repeatedly confirmed by taps placed in Thieu’s office in Saigon by the CIA, which
gave the CIA station in Saigon unparalleled access to Thieu’s thinking and the machinations of the South Vietnamese government
in general.
⁶⁸
An October 26 CIA memo to National Security Advisor Rostow contained a bombshell derived from the taps: “Thieu sees a definite
connection between the moves now underway and President Johnson’s wish to see Vice President Humphrey elected. Thieu referred
many times to the U.S. elections and suggested to his visitors that the current talks are designed to aid Humphrey’s candidacy.
Thieu has said that Johnson and Humphrey will be replaced and then Nixon could change the U.S. position.”
⁶⁹

On October 29, a week before Election Day, Rostow wrote a memo to Johnson that began, “I have been considering the explosive
possibilities of the information that we now have on how certain Republicans may have inflamed the South Vietnamese to behave
as they have been behaving. There is no evidence that Mr. Nixon himself is involved . . . Beyond that, the materials are so
explosive that they could gravely damage the country whether Mr. Nixon is elected or not. If they get out in their present
form, they could be the subject of one of the most acrimonious debates we have ever witnessed.”
⁷⁰

In late October, Johnson ordered FBI assistant director Cartha “Deke” De-Loach to immediately place Anna Chennault under surveillance
and put wiretaps on all of the telephone lines servicing the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington. DeLoach recalls that
he asked Johnson, “Mr. President, please call the Attorney General and instruct him to tell us to do this.” Shortly thereafter,
Attorney General Ramsey Clark instructed the FBI to wiretap the South Vietnamese embassy. According to DeLoach, the taps picked
up no firm evidence that American political figures were trying to influence South Vietnamese politics.
⁷¹

But in the end, Thieu followed the advice he had gotten from Chennault. On November 2, he reneged on his agreement to sit
down in Paris at the same table with the Viet Cong, dashing Johnson’s hopes of negotiating a last-minute deal.

For reasons not yet known, Johnson chosenot to publicly divulge what Nixon’s supporters had done, perhaps because he knew
that revealing it would cause political carnage in Washington. Even if he had disclosed the material, it probably would not
have helped. Three days later, on November 5, Humphrey was decisively defeated, and on January 20, 1969, Richard Nixon became
the new president of the United States.

CHAPTER 9

Tragedy and Triumph

NSA During the Nixon, Ford, and

Carter Administrations

The light shines in the darkness, and the
darkness has not overcome it.

—JOHN 1:5

The Post-Vietnam Blues

On the day that Richard Nixon was sworn in as the president of the United States, January 20, 1969, NSA was a billion-dollar
colossus, consisting of a staggering 93,067 military and civilian personnel in the United States and seventeen foreign countries.
This meant that NSA accounted for 62 percent of the 153,800 military and civilian personnel then engaged in intelligence activities
for the Defense Department.
¹

The six years of the Nixon presidency (1969–1974) were anything but a happy time for NSA. As America’s involvement in the
Vietnam War wound down, the U.S. intelligence community’s resources were dramatically slashed. It lost 40 percent of its budget
and 50 percent of its people. NSA fared worst of all. Its bud get was cut by one third and its manpower fell from 95,000 military
and civilian employees in 1969 (19,300 of whom worked at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade) to approximately 50,000 by 1980,
of whom 16,500 worked at Fort Meade.
²
The cohesion and discipline of the agency’s draftee military personnel deteriorated rapidly. Marijuana usage among military
SIGINT personnel increased dramatically. Courts-martial and other forms of disciplinary action involving SIGINT personnel
rose dramatically, as did desertion and AWOL rates. Radio intercept operators staged work slowdowns to protest American military
operations in Southeast Asia, and NSA personnel even participated in antiwar protests at home against the Vietnam War.
³
The result, according to an NSA historian, was “a scarcely mitigated disaster.”
⁴

The agency’s relationship with the Nixon White House was oftentimes strained. Nixon’s national security advisor from 1969
to 1973, Henry Kissinger, established a precedent followed by many of his successors by centralizing control over the entire
U.S. government’s national security apparatus in his office in the West Wing of the White House, including control of key
intelligence assets, especially the super-sensitive SIGINT product coming out of NSA. Kissinger ordered that all NSA intercepts
mentioning him or Nixon by name be routed to him exclusively and to nobody else in the U.S. intelligence community. According
to former CIA deputy director for intelligence Ray Cline, the CIA objected strongly to this practice, stating that “it made
a very serious impact, adverse to the efficient workings of the intelligence community.” Kissinger also ordered that certain
particularly sensitive NSA intercepts not be shared with the secretaries of state and defense. Colonel Robert Pursley, assistant
to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, recalled that Laird “always had the feeling we weren’t getting all the [NSA] stuff the
White House was. Very little intercept mail was going to Mel and most of what we got was so innocuous.” When Kissinger became
secretary of state in September 1973, he continued the practice of maintaining a back-channel flow of intelligence from NSA.
⁵
Senior NSA officials who dealt with the White House, such as David McManis, the head of the White House Situation Room, walked
a fine line trying to keep on the right side of the law, and not always successfully. As a declassified NSA history admits,
“It was not good for SIGINT, and it was deadly for the presidency.”
⁶

The Shootdown of the EC-121

On April 14, 1969, two North Korean MiG-21 fighters shot down a U.S. Navy EC-121M SIGINT aircraft ninety miles southeast of
the North Korean port of Chongjin, over international waters. The aircraft and its crew of thirty-one, including nine navy
and marine SIGINT operators, were lost.
⁷

The EC-121M took off from Atsugi Naval Air Station, in Japan, at seven a.m. local time on what was supposed to be a routine
Beggar Shadow SIGINT collection mission over the Sea of Japan. The mission had been flown more than 190 times without incident
by U.S. Navy and Air Force reconnaissance aircraft during the first three months of 1969 alone, so local navy commanders thought
there was no reason that this mission should be any different.
⁸

The U.S. Air Force listening post at Osan followed every moment of the North Korean attack until one forty-nine p.m., when
intercepted North Korean radar tracking intercepts showed the North Korean MiGs returning to base and the stricken EC-121
descending rapidly in a spiral toward the sea.
⁹

Radio operators at the EC-121’s home base at Atsugi initially hoped that the aircraft’s pilot had “hit the deck” to evade
the MiGs. But when the plane did not answer repeated calls, at two forty-four p.m. a CRITIC message was issued noting only
that the EC-121 was missing and its fate was unknown. An hour and fifteen minutes later, North Korean state radio announced
that its fighters had shot down an American “spy plane.”
¹⁰

On April 18, an angry President Nixon revealed at a press conference that NSA had read the North Korean air defense radar
tracking codes, stating, “What is even more important, they knew [that the aircraft was over international waters] based on
their radar. Therefore this attack was unprovoked. It was deliberate. It was without warning.” Officials at NSA fell off their
chairs when they heard this astounding compromise of a critical NSA capability. A former senior NSA official recalled, “I
know it was wrong, but I wanted to take Nixon across my knee and give him the paddling of his life for what he had done. It
was inexcusable.”
¹¹

Exit Carter, Enter Gayler

In August 1969, NSA director General Marshall “Pat” Carter retired from active duty. To put it mildly, there were very few
tears shed in Washington when Pat Carter stepped down after four years running the agency. Champagne corks popped throughout
CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on Carter’s last day in office. His subdued retirement ceremony at the Pentagon lasted
only ten minutes, with an NSA historian dryly noting, “The Pentagon was [
sic
] happy to see the last of Marshall Carter as Carter was to leave the wars.”
¹²

Carter’s replacement was a distinguished fifty-four-year-old navy vice admiral named Noel Gayler (pronounced “guy-ler”), who
got the job because he was a protégé of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the new chief of naval operations. Gayler was considered by
many in the Pentagon to be a perfect fit because he was one of the brightest and most capable officers in the military. The
son of a career navy officer, he had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1935 and spent most of his career as a naval
aviator. During World War II, he had been a fighter pilot flying off the aircraft carrier USS
Lexington
, winning three Navy Crosses, the first naval aviator to achieve this distinction. He was also the third navy officer to have
flown a jet aircraft and had piloted the longest flight to date launched from an aircraft carrier. Prior to joining NSA, Gayler
had overseen the selection of nuclear attack targets inside the USSR. But unlike his recent predecessors at NSA, he had no
prior intelligence experience.
¹³

The job was a stepping-stone to higher office, Gayler had been assured, but it came with a price tag. Secretary of Defense
Laird approved the selection of Gayler and his counterpart at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), General Donald Bennett,
because, as Laird later recalled, he could count on their loyalty. As Laird told them in a meeting in his office, they would
have
to be loyal to him if they expected to “get four stars after four years. And goddam it, they were loyal.”
¹⁴

Gayler was not an easy man to get to know, much less like. Described by an NSA historian as “dynamic, mercurial, and high-strung,”
he was a strict, by-the-book naval officer who ran a tight ship and did not tolerate dissent.
¹⁵

Because he did not have a technological background Gayler was never able to fully grasp the details of the important work
that his agency performed. “We were told to ‘dumb-down’ our briefings,” a former NSA official recalled.
¹⁶
Frequently frustrated by the complexity of NSA’s mission, Gayler later told a congressional staff member, “I often felt like
a fire hose was held to my mouth.” He spent most of his three years as director trying to understand the mechanics of how
his agency worked, and he wondered why a more experienced navy intelligence officer had not been selected for the post. Like
so many directors before him, Gayler depended heavily on his civilian deputy, Louis Tordella, to run the agency while he handled
high-level policy matters, especially NSA’s testy relations with the U.S. military.
¹⁷

SIGINT and SALT I

NSA played an enormously important role in the negotiations that led up to the signing, on May 26, 1972, in Moscow of two
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty agreements (collectively known to posterity as SALT I). The first agreement was the Anti-Ballistic
Missile (ABM) Treaty, which limited both the United States and the USSR to a set number of ABM launchers. The second agreement
set firm limits on the total number of strategic nuclear weapons that the two nations could deploy and established strict
guidelines for what new strategic nuclear weapons could be developed in the future.

The covert intercept posts inside the American and British embassies in Moscow, code-named Broadside and Tryst, had collected
highly valuable intelligence, code-named Gamma Guppy, since at least the early 1960s, by listening in on the Soviet leadership
as they talked over the mobile phones in their Chaika limousines. These intercepts were deemed to be so sensitive that their
distribution was limited to a very small number of American and British government officials. Then, in 1972, the Canadian
SIGINT organization, CBNRC, opened its own small clandestine SIGINT intercept facility in Moscow (code-named Stephanie), hidden
inside the military attaché’s office in the Canadian embassy. The Stephanie intercept equipment, which was supplied by NSA,
was able to intercept many of the radio and telephone signals that were being broadcast from the top of the huge Ostankino
radio and TV tower, which loomed over downtown Moscow.
¹⁸

The Gamma Guppy intercepts provided a window, albeit a narrow and imperfect one, into what was going on inside the Kremlin,
including decision-making processes, as well as details on the organization of the Soviet Politburo and the personalities
and behavior of key Politburo figures.
¹⁹
The current director of national intelligence, Rear Admiral John “Mike” McConnell, who served as director of NSA from 1992
to 1996, recalled:

In the mid-1970s, NSA had access to just about everything the Russian leadership said to themselves and about one another
. . . we knew Brezhnev’s waist size, his headaches, his wife, his wife’s problems, his kids’ problems, his intentions on the
Politburo with regard to positions, his opinion on the American leadership, his attitude on negotiations, and on and on and
on it goes.
²⁰

But in September 1971, nationally syndicated newspaper columnist Jack Anderson revealed in an article that “for years, the
CIA has been able to listen to the kingpins of the Kremlin banter, bicker, and backbite among themselves.” According to Anderson’s
column, the intercepts revealed that “the Soviet leaders gossip about one another and complain about their ailments like old
maids.” After Anderson’s column appeared, the Russians reportedly shut off NSA’s access to their car telephone traffic. According
to Admiral McConnell, “Jack Anderson published it on Tuesday and it was gone on Thursday, never to be recovered.”
²¹

Despite the fact that Gamma Guppy had been compromised, the Soviet leaders continued to use this insecure form of communications.
The Gamma Guppy intelligence continued to roll in. For example, on May 22, 1972, four days before SALT was signed, National
Security Advisor Kissinger informed President Nixon that “very recent developments in Moscow indicate that [General Secretary
Leonid] Brezhnev has encountered certain problems regarding his foreign policy . . . There is a suggestion in a sensitive
intercept that Brezhnev used his friend [Soviet Defense Minister Andrei] Grechko to justify his military policies, including
SALT.”
²²
On May 26, the embassy listening post intercepted a crucial radio-telephone conversation between Brezhnev and Grechko about
the Soviet negotiating position on the last day of the summit meeting with President Nixon before the signing of SALT I. Grechko
assured Brezhnev that the huge SS-19 ICBM then being tested could be placed inside the existing SS-11 ICBM silo, thus bypassing
the provision of article 2 of SALT I, which limited increases in silo dimensions to 15 percent. According to publicly available
information, American negotiators “maneuvered with [the SIGINT intercepts] so effectively that they came home with the agreement
not to build an antiballistic missile defense system.” A senior U.S. intelligence official who read the intercepts was quoted
as saying, “That’s the sort of thing that pays NSA’s wages for a year.”
²³

But after more U.S. news reports (many of them inaccurate) during the early 1970s revealed the role played by the Gamma Guppy
intercepts, the Soviets apparently decided to take action. In 1973, they began installing powerful jamming equipment in apartment
buildings surrounding the U.S. embassy, and then periodically bombarded the building with microwave signals. U.S. intelligence
officials believed the Russians were trying to interfere with or block American eavesdropping equipment. But it was not until
May 1975 that the Russians began a continuous microwave bombardment that, according to a declassified CIA report, was done
because of “Soviet embarrassment and dismay caused by US press accounts . . . alluding to a US capability to intercept micro
wave communications in Moscow.”
²⁴