Intel Wars (9 page)

The U.S. State Department itself has become
increasingly active as an intelligence collector since 9/11. Since Barack Obama became president in 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered her diplomats to step up their intelligence collection efforts by laying hands on any kind of personal information about the foreign government officials that they come into contact with, such as business cards; telephone, cell phone, pager, and fax numbers; e-mail addresses; credit card numbers; and even frequent flyer miles accounts.

Unlike Denny Blair's alphabet soup of sixteen national spy agencies, which focus primarily on strategic geopolitical issues of interest to the president and his cabinet members, the Pentagon's 100,000 soldier-spies focus almost exclusively on the kind of arcane intelligence information that only soldiers are typically interested in, such as the organizational structure and deployment of enemy military forces opposing them, how many ships the opposing fleet has, how large their air defense radar network is, how many fighter interceptor aircraft they have and where their bases are located, how much fuel is stored in enemy supply depots, and so on.

Since 9/11 the Pentagon's intelligence community—if it could be called such, because it is not a truly cohesive entity—has sprawled into a massive, labyrinthine, and chaotic polyglot of hundreds of individual commands, staffs, and intelligence collection units deployed in the United States and around the world.

As of 2009, the U.S. Army had a staggering 54,000 men and women
doing intelligence work at home and abroad, twice as many people as the CIA. Almost half of these personnel, more than 19,000 men and women, were assigned as collectors and analysts with army corps, division, brigade, and battalion intelligence staffs, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. Navy's intelligence organization, the Office of Naval Intelligence, was much smaller than army intelligence but was performing some very dangerous missions. The navy was running several dozen top secret submarine reconnaissance missions, code-named Aquador, off the coasts of a number of hostile countries. Some missions covertly monitored Iranian naval activities in the Gulf of Hormuz to ensure the safety of international shipping through these vital sea lanes. Other missions involved tracking foreign merchant shipping believed to have been involved in transporting nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technology. For instance, one naval intelligence officer recalled a series of submarine reconnaissance missions conducted a few years back that surreptitiously tracked the movements of North Korean merchant ships the analysts in Washington believed were carrying ballistic missiles and support equipment, from their home ports to Syria and Iran.

Thanks to massive infusions of cash after 9/11, the size and scope of the U.S. Air Force's intelligence mission had rebounded dramatically since the end of the Cold War. Air Force RC-135 and U-2 reconnaissance aircraft still were producing vast amounts of intelligence information about the military activities of countries such as Syria, Iran, and North Korea.

The air force also controlled a small intelligence organization called the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC) located at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida, which was responsible for detecting foreign nuclear weapons tests. During the Cold War, AFTAC's activities were among the least sensitive in the U.S. intelligence community, but that changed immediately after 9/11, when the air force decided that AFTAC deserved the same degree of secrecy as the CIA and NSA. Between 2001 and 2006, a team of defense contractors belonging to the Raytheon Company working for the air force reclassified over eight thousand documents relating to AFTAC's work held by the National Archives. Among the mundane items that were reclassified were dozens of twenty- and thirty-year-old unclassified State Department press releases about Soviet and Chinese nuclear weapons tests, which the air force security personnel thought revealed the ability of the U.S. intelligence community to monitor foreign nuclear weapons tests, even if the material was fifty years old and available online.

Since 9/11, the U.S. Coast Guard had built up a robust intelligence mission. All of the Coast Guard cutters operating in the Caribbean and Pacific carried small teams of SIGINT operators, who tracked the movements of ships and planes suspected of being used by narcotics traffickers to move cocaine from Latin America to the United States.

But it was the unmanned reconnaissance drone
that had become the superstar of the U.S. military intelligence effort by the time Barack Obama became president. In a span of only seven years, the drone had replaced manned aircraft like the U-2 spy plane as the sensor of choice for reconnaissance in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the CIA, the drone had become the weapon of choice for killing insurgents and terrorists around the world.

The growth of the military's drone fleet since 9/11
had been nothing short of spectacular. In 2002, the military had only 167 drones. By 2009, there were more than 6,000 of the unmanned aircraft flying missions around the world, 2,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan alone. The CIA had its own much smaller and more secretive unit of six Reaper drones that operated from Shamsi and Tarbela airbases in Pakistan, which the agency used to attack al Qaeda and Taliban targets in their sanctuaries in the northern part of the country. Later in 2009, the CIA was forced to move the drones to Jalalabad airfield in southeastern Afghanistan after the London
Times
revealed on February 19 the locations of the airbases in Pakistan from which the drones were flying.

The darling of the American news media, the drones are technological marvels. Powered by little more than a souped-up snowmobile engine, the air force's 118 Predator drones can hit targets with the two Hellfire missiles each carries with pinpoint accuracy from an altitude of 25,000 feet—the equivalent of pitching a strike at Yankee Stadium from a commercial airliner flying high overhead. Its successor, the Reaper, is twice as fast and can fly twice as high, and is far more lethal, carrying six times more bombs and missiles than the Predator.

Then there are the air force's thirteen huge and very secretive RQ-4 Global Hawk strategic reconnaissance drones, whose wings are twenty-one feet longer than a Boeing 737 airliner. Operating from forward operating sites at Sigonella Air Base on the island of Sicily, Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, and Andersen Air Force Base on the Pacific island of Guam, the Global Hawk can take detailed photographs of an entire continent in a single twenty-eight-hour mission. For example, the Global Hawk drones in Sicily, which are housed in a massive new hanger on the east side of Sigonella Air Base, can photograph all of western Iran, the entire Middle East, and the entire North African coastline in a single mission. But air force officials confirm that the Global Hawk drones still suffer from mechanical problems and frequent equipment failures, as has been the case during the ongoing crisis in Libya.

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps fly a much larger number of smaller drones that were designed specifically for the intelligence needs of battalion and company commanders on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. One such drone is the Raven, which is so small that it resembles the balsa-wood toy aircraft that children across America used to fly when they were growing up. Soldiers can carry the four-pound Raven, equipped with a tiny gas-powered engine and an even smaller digital video camera, into the field in a backpack and launch it by just turning on its motor and chucking it into the air like a football.

As important as they have been on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, the drones have proven to be difficult to fly and very expensive to operate. According to intelligence officials, by the end of 2009 the unmanned drone program had become the single most expensive component of the U.S. military's intelligence budget. Today there are more than 20,000 military personnel and civilian contractors operating and maintaining drones around the world, accounting for 20 percent of all military personnel engaged in intelligence work; and it requires roughly $5 billion annually both to operate the drones currently in service and build the new systems just coming off the drawing boards.

One of the reasons the drones are so expensive is that they require a huge number of pilots to fly them remotely, and an even larger number of maintenance people to keep them operational. According to a June 2010 U.S. Air Force briefing paper, it takes 174 pilots, sensor operators, analysts, and maintenance and support personnel to fly a single Predator drone mission, far more than what is needed to fly a comparable mission by a U-2 spy plane. The air force alone has 1,100 airmen in the Middle East and South Asia maintaining the drones that fly daily strike and reconnaissance missions over Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, plus another 5,000 pilots and support personnel back at Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, Nevada, who actually fly the drones by remote control via satellite.

But the biggest problem with the drone program was that the military was building drones faster than it could process the materials the crafts were producing. The amount of raw video footage and SIGINT data that each drone mission generates is so massive that the air force's swamped intelligence analysts have coined a phrase to describe it—“data crush.”

According to a current-serving U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, the unmanned drone programs are a classic case of “bureaucracy run amok.” According to the officer, the air force “pushed into operation a sexy new piece of high-tech spy gear without giving much thought to the human dimension … how much data these new machines were going to produce and how many people were going to be needed to process and analyze the data … We put the cart before the horse once again.”

Whatever one may think about the profession of spying, one has to admit that the men and women who serve in the intelligence community are, and have always been, a very talented and dedicated group of people.

The late General William E. Odom, the director of the NSA from 1985 to 1988, liked to tell the story of bringing a group of visitors down to the basement of the NSA headquarters building at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, to see the agency's massive complex of computers. As they were passing through the area that contained a number of glass-enclosed Cray supercomputers, the general noticed a partially clothed man fast asleep on top of one of the cooling coils that surrounded the computer. According to the general, the man, who was one of NSA's “computer nerds” responsible for keeping the enormously expensive Crays up and running, had been babysitting the computer all night because it had been malfunctioning the day before. Rather than go home at the end of his shift, the technician had decided to camp out inside the computer's glass enclosure so that he could be there in case the system malfunctioned during the night. General Odom was so impressed that he gave the man a cash reward for his dedication to duty, as well as a fierce dressing-down for embarrassing him in front of the visiting dignitaries.

The list of famous personalities who have at one time or another served in the intelligence community is long and distinguished. Three former U.S. Supreme Court justices were spies during World War II. Justice John Paul Stevens was a Navy codebreaker. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. analyzed German ULTRA radio intercepts. And Justice Byron “Whizzer” White was a naval intelligence officer in the Pacific who wrote the report on the sinking of PT-109, whose captain was future president Lieutenant John F. Kennedy. Country music star Johnny Cash was a Morse intercept operator in the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s. Comedian David Brenner served as a cryptologist in the U.S. Army in Germany in the 1960s. Former television talk show host Montel Williams was a linguist and cryptologic officer in the U.S. Navy who conducted a number of top secret submarine reconnaissance missions off the Soviet coastline during the 1980s. Wanda Sykes worked as a procurement officer at NSA headquarters from 1986 to 1992 before leaving the agency to work full-time as a stand-up comic.

There are literally thousands of equally talented and dedicated men and women who work today for the U.S. intelligence community. One U.S. Army Pashto linguist interviewed for this book was in civilian life a computer software designer who studied languages as a form of recreation. He enlisted in the Texas Army National Guard and served a tour of duty in Afghanistan because, as he put it, “someone has to do it. It might as well be me.”

There is no fast and firm rule for what a typical American spy looks like. Generally speaking, they tend to be young (according to statistics provided by the DNI's office, half of all the employees of the intelligence community—100,000 people—have been hired since 9/11), computer literate, and well educated (the number of individuals holding advanced university degrees is higher in the intelligence community than in just about any other branch of the U.S. government). Most have traveled or studied abroad, the majority of the operations officers and analysts speak at least one foreign language, and they have all passed some of the most rigorous psychological tests (a stable personality is of paramount importance) and background investigations ever devised before being allowed to handle classified information.

The National Security Agency, the nation's eavesdropping giant, is the largest employer of linguists, mathematicians, computer scientists, software designers, and electronic engineers in the U.S. government. As was the case during the Cold War, both NSA and the U.S. military still like to recruit many of their linguists from among the Mormon population in Utah because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints encourages all young men to serve two years as missionaries, giving those who serve abroad invaluable exposure to foreign cultures and language skills that are hard to find in the general U.S. population. The fact that Mormons do not, as a rule, smoke or drink alcohol also makes them easier to clear for access to classified information than many of their fellow Americans.