The Secret Sentry (20 page)

A massive evacuation operation to remove the last Americans and their South Vietnamese allies from Saigon began on April 29.
Navy helicop ters from the aircraft carrier USS
Hancock
, cruising offshore, began shuttling back and forth, carrying seven thousand Americans and South Vietnamese to safety. U.S.
Air Force U-2 and RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft were orbiting off the coast monitoring North Vietnamese radio traffic to
detect any threat to the evacuation. In the confusion, Glenn discovered that no one had made any arrangements to evacuate
his remaining staff, so the U.S. military attaché arranged for cars to pick up Glenn and his people at their compound outside
Saigon and transport them to the embassy. That night, Glenn and his colleagues boarded a U.S. Navy helicop ter for the short
ride to one of the navy ships off the coast.
⁶⁴

But the thousands of South Vietnamese SIGINT officers and intercept operators, including their chief, General Pham Van Nhon,
never got out. The North Vietnamese captured the entire twenty-seven-hundred-man organization intact as well as all their
equipment. An NSA history notes, “Many of the South Vietnamese SIGINTers undoubtedly perished; others wound up in reeducation
camps. In later years a few began trickling into the United States under the orderly departure program. Their story is yet
untold.” By any measure, it was an inglorious end to NSA’s fifteen-year involvement in the Vietnam War, one that still haunts
agency veterans to this day.
⁶⁵

CHAPTER 8

Riding the Whirlwind

NSA During the Johnson Administration:

1963–1969

Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
(We gladly feast on those who would subdue us).

—MORTICIA ADDAMS, THE ADDAMS FAMILY

The State of the SIGINT Nation

Between 1961 and 1969, NSA grew from 59,000 military and civilian personnel, with a bud get of $654 million, to a staggering
93,067 men and women, 19,300 of whom worked at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, in Maryland. The agency’s budget stood at over
$1 billion.
¹

As it quickly became larger than all the other U.S. intelligence agencies combined, it was developing and deploying cutting-edge
technology that radically transformed how it collected and produced intelligence. Beginning in 1960, NSA’s highly classified
Boresight project employed special equipment at Naval Security Group high-frequency direction-finding (HFDF) listening posts
that could locate the source of the burst transmissions of Soviet submarines in the Atlantic and the Pacific.
²
Later in the 1960s, a new worldwide ocean surveillance SIGINT system was brought online called Classic Bullseye. An automated,
larger, faster, and more capable HFDF system than previous manual versions, Classic Bullseye merged and modernized the naval
SIGINT intercept and HFDF resources of all five UKUSA member nations. It enabled the United States and its SIGINT partners
to track in near real time the movements and activities of Soviet warships and submarines around the world. By the early 1970s,
the Naval Security Group Command was operating twenty-one Classic Bullseye stations around the world, which were integrated
with eight stations operated by NSA’s UKUSA partners.
³

NSA also fitted out seven spy ships under the rather transparent cover description of “Technical Research Ships.” In June
1956, NSA director General Ralph Canine had recommended putting NSA intercept gear on U.S. Navy ships as a rapid-reaction
force to cover contingencies in parts of the world where NSA did not have listening posts. Under pressure from the CIA in
the late 1950s, NSA increased its SIGINT coverage of areas it had long neglected, particularly Latin America and Africa, where
events commanded greater U.S. intelligence attention following the granting of indepen dence to former colonies by Eu ro pean
nations. Small but bloody guerrilla wars, many communist-backed, broke out throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia. To
monitor all these developments, NSA built its own fleet of spy ships— patterned after the Russian spy trawlers that had lurked
off American territorial waters since the early 1950s— which were to be manned by U.S. Navy officers and crews but used exclusively
for NSA.
⁴

With the launch of the first “ferret” electronic intelligence satellites by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in the
early 1960s, NSA also played an increasingly important role in space, its ELINT collection exponentially expanding what the
U.S. intelligence community knew about the Soviet Union. Between 1963 and 1967, American ferret satellites mapped the locations
and ascertained the capabilities of virtually every Soviet radar site in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, as well as all
Chinese, North Korean, and North Vietnamese radar systems. By 1967, the ELINT database had enabled the CIA to issue its first
truly comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate on the state of Soviet air defenses, an assessment based almost entirely
on SIGINT.
⁵

Beginning in 1966, the U.S. intelligence community became alarmed about the nascent Soviet antiballistic missile (ABM) system
that was then being constructed around Moscow. Given a November 17, 1966, U.S. Intelligence Board mandate, CIA director Richard
Helms ordered his agency to develop—in a year or less—a new ELINT satellite to collect intelligence about Soviet ABM work.
It was developed, produced, and launched by the NRO, and the first of the new ABM-intercept satellites went into orbit in
early 1968. Colonel John Copley, head of the NSA division processing the satellite intercepts, later recounted, “By 1968 data
from these payloads and the follow-on systems had identified early ABM-associated radars, greatly reducing the uncertainty
associated with the Soviet strategic threat.”
⁶

To exploit the cornucopia of intercepted SIGINT data, NSA’s basement computer complex expanded dramatically in the 1960s,
particularly with the advent of IBM’s development in the late 1950s of a revolutionary new data processor called Stretch,
which was one hundred times more powerful than any other existing computer system. NSA’s deputy director, Louis Tordella,
immediately ordered the computer. The first one, christened Harvest by NSA, was delivered in early 1962. With the capacity
to read three million characters per minute, Harvest could do in minutes what older computers had taken weeks to accomplish.
For example, in 1968 Harvest took only three hours and fifty minutes to scan seven million intercepts to see if they contained
any of seven thousand words and phrases on a watch list, which equated to over thirty thousand intercepts scanned per minute.
This huge computer system, the agency’s workhorse for the next fifteen years, is generally credited with helping NSA stay
competitive in the code-breaking game throughout the 1960s and was reportedly instrumental in helping NSA solve a number of
important Soviet cipher systems during the 1970s.
⁷

By 1968, NSA’s inventory of computers dwarfed the computing power of the rest of the U.S. government combined, with the exception
of the somewhat smaller computer complex used by the nuclear weapons designers of the Atomic Energy Commission. NSA’s director,
General Marshall Carter, boasted, “NSA had over 100 computers occupying almost 5 acres of floorspace.”
⁸

I Get the Sense You Are Disappointed

But despite all of the new technology at NSA’s command, it was becoming increasingly difficult to produce against its primary
targets. To NSA’s frustration, a new generation of computerized cipher machines were being introduced around the world, which
taxed the ability of NSA’s cryptanalysts to the limit, making it even more difficult for NSA to produce meaningful intelligence.
As this increasingly worrisome decline continued, senior U.S. intelligence officials began to question whether SIGINT was
worth all of the time, effort, and money allotted to it. The greatest problem was that twenty years after the end of World
War II, NSA still could not read high-level enciphered Russian traffic. By 1965, there was a widespread belief within the
U.S. intelligence community that the decline in NSA’s intelligence production had reached worrisome proportions, with a declassified
CIA memo admitting that “SIGINT, striving for breakthroughs, is struggling against the growing security barriers that increasingly
prevent readout of wanted information from signals.”
⁹

A special unit called A5 was created in 1961 to mount an all-out assault on Soviet codes, headed by one of NSA’s best cryptanalysts,
William Lutwiniak, who in his spare time was also the editor of the
Washington Post
crossword puzzle. He had been hired by the legendary William Friedman in February 1941 and worked on Japanese codes during
the war. After that, he turned his attention to Russian ciphers, including some groundbreaking work on the solution of the
Venona material. He would head A5 for the next twelve years. Unfortunately, he came in at a time when the hugely expensive
cryptanalytic effort against Russian high-level ciphers remained stalled, with only one Soviet high-grade cipher machine system
then being partially readable. According to a confidential source, the two Russian cipher machine systems that NSA was partially
exploiting at the time—Silver and Mercury— yielded a trickle of intelligence rather than a flood.

Concerned about the declining value of NSA’s cryptanalytic product, and in partic u lar the agency’s lack of progress against
Soviet cipher systems, in 1965 the CIA asked the former chief of the agency’s Clandestine Ser vice, Richard “Dick” Bissell,
to take a long, hard look at NSA’s cryptanalytic efforts. Working largely by himself, Dick Bissell examined the long-term
prospects for success against Soviet cipher systems. Bissell concluded that there should be no reduction in NSA’s overall
cryptanalytic effort, but recommended that many of the NSA personnel then working on Soviet systems might be better employed
working on the ciphers of “softer” non-Soviet targets.
¹⁰

This meant that NSA’s most productive sources during the 1960s remained low-level signals sources that still had to be harvested
and analyzed en masse in order to derive even a modicum of useful intelligence. For example, NSA was able to locate a few
Soviet ICBM launch sites and missile test and production facilities by carefully monitoring the flight activity of special
transport aircraft belonging to a number of special Soviet air force transport units based in and around Moscow whose function
was to transport senior military officials and scientists and engineers involved in the missile program throughout the country.
¹¹
In a similar vein, virtually all of the intelligence that NSA was producing in the 1950s and early 1960s concerning Soviet
nuclear weapons testing activities was based almost entirely on intercepts of low-level radio traffic relating to special
transport aircraft flight activity and weather reporting relating to Russian nuclear weapons tests, as well as exploiting
the unencrypted communications traffic of the Soviet nuclear test detection system.
¹²

But declassified documents show that it was becoming increasingly difficult for NSA to get at these low-level targets because
beginning in the early 1960s, the Russians moved important chunks of their telephone and telegraph traffic to new telecommunications
systems which the agency could not intercept, such as buried coaxial cable links and micro wave radio-relay systems. According
to former senior CIA official Albert Wheelon, by 1963 “communications intelligence against the USSR was helpful but eroding
as the Soviets moved their traffic to landlines and microwave links.” This meant that NSA’s collection specialists spent the
entire decade of the 1960s trying as best they could to“reestablish COMINT access to Soviet and Chinese communications traffic.”
¹³

Pat’s House

In April 1965, Lieutenant General Gordon Blake retired and was replaced as NSA’s director by his 1931 West Point classmate
Lieutenant General Marshall “Pat” Carter, who was to become one of the most important men ever to head the agency, for better
and for worse.

Carter served in a variety of antiaircraft artillery postings in the United States, Hawaii, and Panama before the army recognized
his considerable intellect and sent him to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he graduated in
1936. From 1946 to 1947, he was the executive assistant to General George Marshall when the latter served as Truman’s special
envoy to China. To everyone’s surprise, the taciturn Marshall and the jovial bon vivant Carter got along so well that when
Marshall was named secretary of state in January 1947, he asked the Pentagon if he could keep Carter on as his assistant.
After graduating from the National War College in June 1950, Carter moved over to the Pentagon to return to his old job as
executive assistant to Marshall, who was now the secretary of defense. From that point onward, Carter served in a number of
significant command positions. In March 1962, President Kennedy named him the deputy director of the CIA despite the fact
that he had no prior intelligence experience. The job came with a promotion to the rank of lieutenant general. At the CIA,
he was intimately involved in Operation Mongoose, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, which brought
him into close contact with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and their cabinet members on a daily basis. Carter remained at
the CIA until he was named director of NSA.
¹⁴

Bald and pudgy, and not particularly imposing, Carter was bright, shrewd, and an extremely capable administrator, which, coupled
with his lengthy exposure to high-level policy making in Washington, made him formidable. He also had a wicked sense of humor
that was infamous throughout Washington.

When the aloof CIA director John McCone sealed up the connecting door to Carter’s adjacent office at the agency’s Langley,
Virginia, headquarters in the dead of night, Carter affixed a fake hand to the wall where the door used to be, a less than
subtle way of making fun of McCone’s action, but also leaving Carter’s visitors to wonder if McCone was trying to get out
of his office. When McCone asked that perfumes and special toilet paper be placed in his private bathroom at Langley to accommodate
the needs of his new wife, Carter responded by installing a container in his private bathroom to hold, among other things,
a selection of corncob pipes and a well-worn copy of the Sears catalog.
¹⁵

Despite the fact that he had never before commanded anything as large or complex as NSA, in a matter of months Carter began
transforming the agency to fit his own personal vision, and he launched an intensive lobbying campaign to promote NSA within
the U.S. intelligence community. This instantly brought him into conflict with senior officials at the CIA, who were inherently
fearful of NSA’s growing power within the community, and with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s Pentagon, which wanted
a docile agency that would do as it was told. Rather than bend or compromise, Carter, as a declassified NSA history puts it,
“fell on a startled national defense community like a bobcat on the back of a moose.”
¹⁶

The years 1965 through 1969 were marked by a never-ending series of brawls that pitted Carter and NSA against virtually everybody
else in official Washington. In short order, the director managed to alienate McNamara, the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff,
and most of the other senior military commanders, which “poisoned the atmosphere and led to a confrontational relationship
between NSA and the military it was sworn to support.” To many of his subordinates, it seemed as if Carter was deliberately
picking fights with anyone who stood in his way.
¹⁷