The Secret Sentry (21 page)

If anything, NSA’s relationship with the U.S. intelligence community was worse. As the agency’s influence inside the Johnson
White House increased, so too did fear and resentment within the intelligence community. In a series of running battles, the
CIA charged that NSA was producing finished intelligence in violation of NSC guidelines; that NSA deliberately sat on intelligence
that the CIA needed so that it could look good with the White House; that the analysts at Fort Meade were not getting material
to the intelligence community fast enough; and that NSA was flouting the authority of the director of central intelligence
to manage the entire U.S. intelligence community.
¹⁸

The Six-Day War and the Attack on the USS
Liberty

Well before the start of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, NSA listening posts around the Middle East detected a substantial
increase in Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Israeli military activity along the first three countries’ borders with Israel,
including troop and equipment concentrations, intensified military exercises, and increased Israeli reconnaissance overflights
of the other countries. The Naval Security Group (NSG) listening post in Morocco also picked up clear indications of impending
hostilities from its intercepts of Egyptian military radio traffic.
¹⁹

On April 7, 1967, a border clash between Israeli and Syrian troops in the Golan Heights escalated into a pitched battle, with
the Israeli air force conducting dozens of air strikes on Syrian military positions deep inside Syria. This prompted NSA to
declare a SIGINT Readiness Alfa alert for all Middle East targets. The alert was terminated three days later after the fighting
ceased.
²⁰

But the situation in the region continued to deteriorate. On April 22, NSA intercepted radio traffic revealed that Egyptian
TU-16 Badger bombers were dropping mustard gas bombs on Yemeni royalist positions in North Yemen. Between May 11 and May 14,
the bombers struck a number of towns in southern Saudi Arabia, prompting NSA to increase its SIGINT coverage of Egyp-tian
military activity in Yemen because of the threat it posed to America’s ally in the region, Saudi Arabia.
²¹

More ominously, NSA intercepted and decrypted a message sent on May 13 by the Egyptian ambassador in Moscow to Cairo that,
according to a CIA report, stated “Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Semenov had told the Egyptians that Israel was preparing
a ground and air attack on Syria—to be carried out between 17 and 21 May. It stated that the Soviets had advised the UAR [United
Arab Republic] to be prepared, to stay calm, and not to be drawn into fighting with Israel.” The Russian warning was totally
wrong, but it gave Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser an excuse to ratchet up the tension level, with a CIA report dryly
noting, “The Arabs were to take the information but not the advice.”
²²
The next day, radio intercepts arriving at NSA confirmed that the Egyptians had just placed their entire air defense force
on alert and sortied a number of warships out to sea. With this move, NSA extended its SIGINT alert to all Middle Eastern
targets.
²³

Nasser’s intentions were clearly indicated by his demand, on May 19, for the removal of all U.N. peacekeeping forces in the
Sinai Peninsula, which had been in place since the end of the 1956 Arab-Israeli War. After the United Nations withdrew, fifty
thousand Egyptian troops along with five hundred tanks streamed across the Suez Canal. SIGINT reporting from the U.S. Air
Force listening post at Iráklion, on the island of Crete, showed that the majority of the Egyptian armored and infantry units
in the Sinai were now deployed from east to west between the city of Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, and the town of El-Arish,
on the north coast of the Sinai.
²⁴
On May 22, Egyptian naval forces imposed a blockade on the Strait of Tiran and closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping,
prompting the full-scale mobilization of the Israeli Defense Forces. NSA SIGINT revealed that an Egyptian coastal artillery
unit had taken up positions at Sharm al-Sheikh, at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, and that Egyptian torpedo boats were now
patrolling the Strait of Tiran, giving the Egyptians the means to attack any ship attempting to sail to the Israeli port of
Eilat. The following day, the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence (OCI) formed a Middle East task force in order to monitor
the increasingly tense situation in the region, and on May 23, NSA raised its alert status to SIGINT Readiness Bravo Crayon
for all Middle East targets, its highest non-wartime alert readiness level.
²⁵
All NSA-controlled listening posts capable of Middle East intercepts were ordered to intensify coverage of military targets
in the region, especially the U.S. Army’s huge listening post outside Asmara, Ethiopia, known as Kag-new Station; the U.S.
Air Force intercept station at Iráklion; and the U.S. Navy listening posts at Yerolakkos on Cyprus, Sidi Yahia in Morocco,
and Rota, Spain. NSA also had a few small clandestine listening posts hidden inside U.S. embassies in places like Beirut,
which were operated by ASA through an intensely secretive 337-man unit whose oblique cover name was the U.S. Army Communications
Support Unit. NSA feared that in the event of war, Egypt and its Arab allies would break diplomatic relations and force the
closure of the embassies, shutting down those listening posts. Accordingly, on May 23, NSA ordered the U.S. Navy SIGINT ship
USS
Liberty
to sail for the eastern Mediterranean at top speed.
²⁶

Until its arrival, only a few U.S. Air Force and Navy reconnaissance aircraft equipped for SIGINT collection, based outside
Athens, were available for close-up monitoring of the situation, so they were given daily missions off the coast of the Sinai
to collect increased intercepts of very high frequency (VHF) and ultrahigh frequency (UHF) Arab and Israeli military radio
traffic. These missions yielded full confirmation that Arab and Israeli military forces were on a state of high alert.
²⁷

During the first weeks of June, radio intercepts revealed that Egyptian antiaircraft batteries deployed around Sharm al-Sheikh
had opened fire on Israeli Mirage fighters patrolling the area. COMINT also showed that Egyptian air force aircraft were conducting
aerial reconnaissance missions along the border with Israel, and that Egyptian navy torpedo boats had intensified their patrolling
activities in the Strait of Tiran.
²⁸
By June 3, COMINT revealed that Egyptian transport aircraft had flown several elite commando battalions to Jordan.
²⁹

Intercepts by NSA and Great Britain’s GCHQ of French diplomatic communications confirmed these and other developments at a
time when the United States did not have diplomatic relations with Egypt (hence no firsthand intelligence reporting). The
French ambassadors in Cairo and Tel Aviv were trying to broker a peaceful settlement between Egypt and Israel over the Sinai
before it erupted in war. NSA was also intercepting and reading Soviet diplomatic radio traffic between Moscow and its military
representatives in Cairo, which indicated that the Soviets believed that war between Israel and Egypt was imminent. In April,
NSA issued a CRITIC warning after COMINT detected Russian military preparations for this eventuality.
³⁰

On Sunday morning, June 4, NSA decoded an intercept (whether from French or Israeli communications is still unknown), which
revealed that the Israelis intended to attack Egypt within twenty-four hours. One of the very few U.S. government officials
cleared for access to this material was a State Department intelligence analyst named Philip Merrill, who was the duty officer
in the State Department INR unit that handled SIGINT. Merrill later recalled, “I checked this one morning and a certain word
we were looking for, let’s just call it
Geronimo
, came in at 5:00 a.m. This was the jump-off word [ for the Israeli attack] and there was some limited associated material
with it.” Merrill raced upstairs to Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s office, but Rusk was closeted in a meeting on the crisis
with Secretary of Defense McNamara, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, and others. Of those attending, only Rusk, McNamara,
and Rostow were cleared for access to the NSA material, so Rusk’s executive secretary devised a pretext for getting thosenot
cleared out of the room so that Merrill could pass on the message. Merrill found it all somewhat amusing but says that it
was “an indication for the record of history, how tightly held much of this was.”
³¹

Monday morning, June 5, started normally for the radio intercept operators at the U.S. Army’s huge Kagnew Station, in Ethiopia.
At eight a.m. local time (two a.m. Washington time), operators were waiting to be relieved by the day shift when, a former
army intercept supervisor recalled years later, one of the night shift’s French linguists announced that “some guy was screaming
in French and there were clearly bombs exploding in the background. It turned out that the source of the commotion was a French
reporter at the Cairo air-port, who was yelling into a telephone describing the bombing of the airport while Israeli bombs
rained down around him.” The 1967 Arab-Israeli War had just begun.
³²

The majority of the four hundred combat aircraft belonging to the Israeli air force were busy destroying virtually all of
the Egyptian air force’s airfields. A smaller number of Israeli fighter-bombers were at the same time attacking key military
airfields in Jordan, Syria, and western Iraq. As a declassified NSA history notes, “by nightfall Israel had complete mastery
of the sky having virtually destroyed four Arab air forces.”
³³

Around three a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) NSA placed all of its units in the Middle East on SIGINT Readiness Alfa, and
some of them intercepted the following Egyptian radio message: “Cairo has just been informed at least five of its airfields
in Sinai and the Canal area have suddenly become unser-viceable.” Less than an hour later, the NSA listening post at Iráklion
intercepted a Jordanian air force message indicating that a number of its airfields were also being attacked by Israeli fighter-bombers.
³⁴

National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, reading forwarded raw transcripts of these intercepts in the White House Situation
Room (the first reached him shortly after nine a.m.), phoned President Johnson with summaries as soon as they came in. The
SIGINT reporting convinced Rostow and Johnson that the Israelis had just launched a massive first strike against the opposing
Arab air forces. By midafternoon, it was clear that the Israelis had almost completely wiped out the Egyptian and Jordanian
air forces, leading Rostow to send a memo to Johnson later that afternoon titled “The first day’s Turkey Shoot.”
³⁵

Chaos within the Egyptian military command structure, as reflected in the COMINT intercepts, was so pervasive that Egyptian
military communications personnel stopped enciphering their communications and talked in the clear, giving an unexpected gift
to American, British, and Israeli radio intelligence personnel.
³⁶
SIGINT during the war also revealed that Iraq, which had promised to provide the Syrians fighting the Israelis in the Golan
Heights with a full combat division, had in fact not moved any units toward its border with Syria.
³⁷

Beginning on June 6, the day after the Israeli offensive began, and continuing for the next three weeks, NSA listening posts
in Europe and the Middle East monitored over 350 flights of Russian military transport aircraft from the Soviet Union to Syria
and Egypt carry ing military equipment and supplies.
³⁸

But the Russian shipments were all for naught. By the end of June 7, virtually all the Egyptian army units in the Sinai had
been destroyed, and the survivors were fleeing back to Egypt as fast as they could. Robert Wilson, an Arabic linguist on the
NSA spy ship the
Liberty
, which had finally arrived off the north coast of the Sinai on June 7, recalled, “Once we got on station, the Egyptians were
dead, practically. There was no voice communications at all that we could pick up, except for the Israelis.” Unfortunately,
as recently declassified NSA material reveals, the
Liberty
had sailed without any Hebrew linguists aboard, since NSA had not tasked it to intercept Israeli communications before it
sailed.
³⁹

SIGINT was able to show that the Egyptian general staff was desperately trying to extricate what was left of its decimated
forces from the Sinai. By the end of June 8, NSA analysts knew that the war was for all intents and purposes over, having
intercepted a message from the commander of Israeli forces in the Sinai telling Tel Aviv that his forces were “camping on
the banks of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea.”
⁴⁰

But that afternoon, Israeli fighter-bombers and motor torpedo boats attacked the
Liberty
as it sailed in international waters off the north coast of the Sinai. The attack killed 34 members of the ship’s crew, including
25 navy, marine, and NSA civilian cryptologists in its research spaces, and wounded a further 171 crew members. This incident
represents the single worst loss of SIGINT personnel in NSA’s history, something for which, understandably, many former NSA
personnel and most crewmen who were on the
Liberty
have never forgiven the Israelis.
⁴¹

While the
Liberty
was unable to read the communications in Hebrew of the attacking Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats, a U.S. Navy EC-121M
SIGINT aircraft flying out of its base in Greece was able to intercept the radio traffic between Israeli helicopter pilots
scouting the ship and their ground controller at Hatzor Air Base, near Tel Aviv, shortly after the attacks took place.
⁴²
These intercepts confirmed that Israeli forces had attacked the
Liberty
, and that the Israelis had failed to identify it as an American ship before or during the attack. One intercept caught the
pilot of one of the Israeli helicopters radioing that the attacked ship was “definitely Egyptian.”
⁴³