The Secret Sentry (24 page)

Lew Allen Takes the Helm

In June 1972, Admiral Gayler left NSA—and got his fourth star when Nixon promoted him to the post of heading up CINCPAC, in
Hawaii.

His replacement as director of NSA was Air Force Lieutenant General Samuel Phillips, fifty-one, who like Gayler had no intelligence
experience before arriving at Fort Meade. Phillips was an accomplished research engineer, holding a master’s degree in electrical
engineering from the University of Michigan. He worked on nuclear delivery systems (aircraft and missiles) and the Apollo
project, and just prior to his appointment to NSA he had been responsible for launching missiles and satellites into space.
²⁵

Phillips did not remain at NSA long enough to leave an imprint, much less a legacy. According to his successor, Lieutenant
General Lew Allen, shortly after arriving at NSA, Phillips became aware of his agency’s involvement in a number of peripheral
issues relating to the escalating Watergate scandal, which “influenced his determination to move on.”
²⁶
The one significant decision Phillips made that was to have a long-term impact was to begin “civilianizing” many SIGINT collection
functions formerly performed by the military, as well as automating many of NSA’s SIGINT processing, analytic, and reporting
functions so as to reduce the agency’s huge civilian payroll.
²⁷

On August 19, 1973, Phillips was replaced by Allen, a forty-eight-year-old U.S. Air Force officer who was a rare individual
for the U.S. military—a certifiable genius who also had a talent for management and a deep understanding of, and interest
in, technical matters. He started his air force career as a nuclear weapons ordnance officer with the Strategic Air Command,
but his intellect predestined him for greater things. The air force sent him to the University of Illinois, where he obtained
both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. Upon graduating, he was ordered to the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory,
where he worked from 1954 to 1957 as a physicist in the nuclear weapons test division studying the effects of high-altitude
nuclear detonations on missiles. He then moved into the field of satellite reconnaissance, serving for eight years with the
U.S. Air Force component of the National Reconnaissance Office in Los Angeles, from 1965 to 1973. After a brief tenure as
the assistant to the director of the CIA for the Intelligence Community Staff, Allen’s benefactor in Washington, Secretary
of Defense James Schlesinger, arranged for him to become director of NSA.
²⁸

Perhaps one of the brightest men ever to sit in the NSA director’s office, Allen proved to be the perfect man to hold the
post during what would be one of the most difficult periods in the agency’s history. Some of Allen’s subordinates at NSA recalled
that the highly focused and businesslike director’s face didn’t reveal much about what he was thinking. Those who got to know
him quickly warmed to him, even those who were not necessarily friends of NSA. L. Britt Snider, who in 1975 was the chief
counsel of the Church Committee, which was investigating NSA’s domestic activities, described Allen as “a man of impeccable
integrity,” seemingly a rare virtue in those troubled days in Washington.
²⁹

Allen’s four-year tenure as NSA director was marred by controversy, with NSA being forced to admit publicly in August 1975
that it had engaged in illegal domestic eavesdropping since 1945. Allen was compelled to testify before Congress, the first
time ever that an NSA director testified in public session about the activities of the agency.
³⁰

NSA Enters the Space Race

Unbeknownst to the American public, Allen’s tenure was also marked by a number of secret cryptologic successes, many of them
brought on by the introduction of new high-tech spying systems, such as a new generation of satellites placed into orbits
chosen specifically to facilitate the monitoring of Soviet communications traffic.

Three new types of SIGINT satellites, whose classified nicknames were Canyon, Jumpseat, and Chalet, were put into orbit starting
in the late 1960s and continuing throughout the 1970s. These satellites gave NSA access for the first time to high-level telephone
traffic deep inside the USSR that was being carried over micro wave radio-relay networks.
³¹
The level of detail obtained from the intercepts produced by these satellites was so high that a former American intelligence
officer stated “We could hear their teeth chattering in the Ukraine.”
³²

The CIA’s brand-new Rhyolite SIGINT satellite revolutionized the U.S. intelligence community’s knowledge of Soviet strategic
weapons development by intercepting previously unheard telemetry data coming from Soviet strategic ballistic missile and bomber
test sites deep inside the Soviet Union. The former CIA deputy director for science and technology Albert Wheelon was to later
write that thanks to this satellite, “the intelligence community eventually had almost the same data on each ICBM flight as
that available to Soviet engineers. It was immediately clear from the telemetry what type of missile had been flown. When
test launches failed, the reason was usually apparent in the telemetry data and the missile’s reliability could be established
with some confidence. As the Soviets changed from single warhead missiles to multiple warhead reentry vehicles, that change
was apparent in the data.”
³³

Then, in the fall of 1976, the U.S. Navy ELINT organization launched into orbit the first of its brand-new ocean surveillance
satellites, whose classified nickname was Parcae. The system had the unclassified designation of White Cloud, and its clusters
of satellites continuously orbited the earth, allowing the navy to track the movements of virtually every warship— Russian,
Chinese, or otherwise— on a real-time basis and to a degree that heretofore had not been possible or even imagined.
³⁴
According to an Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)–sponsored historical study, “ELINT collection and analysis improved to
such an extent that individual Soviet units could be tracked through entire deployments by following the radiation emitted
by their navigation and surface-search radar sets.”
³⁵

The 1973 Arab-Israeli War

On October 6, 1973, one hundred thousand Egyptian troops backed by one thousand tanks launched a surprise attack on Israel
across the Suez Canal, and fifty thousand Syrian troops advanced into the Golan Heights. Not only were the Israelis caught
entirely by surprise, but so was the U.S. intelligence community. Postmortem studies conducted by the community revealed that
NSA’s reporting on Egypt and Syria’s preparations for attacking Israel either had been rejected out of hand by the CIA’s intelligence
analysts or had been so secret that the vast majority of the analysts at Langley had not been cleared to see it.
³⁶

The Top Secret Codeword daily and weekly SIGINT summaries prior to the attack from NSA’s Office of the Middle East, North
Africa, Cuba, Central and South America (G6), then headed by navy captain Dwane Yoder, were chockfull of high-quality intelligence
reporting about political, military, and economic activities in the Arab world. Not only did NSA have particularly deep and
comprehensive insights into the capabilities of the Egyptian army, the Arab world’s largest, but it also had detected the
arrival of North Korean fighter pilots and air defense personnel as well as Iraqi Hawker Hunter and Libyan Mirage fighters.
The CIA and NSA clandestine listening posts hidden inside the U.S. embassies in Cairo and Damascus were also providing Washington
with excellent intelligence from their coverage of local government, military, and police radio traffic. A former CIA operations
officer who was in Cairo in 1973 recalled, “We even knew what [Egyptian president Anwar] Sadat was telling his ministers on
the phone.”
³⁷

The problem was that since 1967, CIA intelligence analysts back in Washington had formed a distinctly negative impression
of the readiness and overall combat capabilities of the Egyptian and Syrian militaries, a view encouraged by reports supplied
by Israeli intelligence. When Sadat kicked his Russian military advisers out of Egypt in July 1972, DIA and CIA intelligence
analysts further downgraded their estimates of Egyptian combat capabilities, particularly those of Sadat’s air force, an estimate
that was, unfortunately, reinforced by some NSA SIGINT intelligence sent to Langley.
³⁸

And yet, starting in the summer of 1973, accumulating NSA SIGINT data clearly indicated that Egypt and Syria were preparing
to attack Israel, and in late September NSA reported that it would be “a major offensive.” The SIGINT evidence for these preparations
was voluminous and highly detailed, including the fact that the Egyptian military had canceled leaves and mobilized its reserves,
and that a special command post outside Cairo that in the past had been used only for crisis situations had been activated.
Extremely sensitive NSA Top Secret Gamma intercepts also revealed that “a major foreign nation [the Soviet Union] had become
extremely sensitive to the prospect of war and concerned about their citizens and dependents in Egypt.” All this led NSA intelligence
analysts to conclude that war was imminent.
³⁹

The CIA postmortem study noted, “The information provided by those parts of the Intelligence Community responsible for intelligence
collection [NSA] was sufficient to prompt such a warning. Such information (derived from both human and technical sources)
was not conclusive but was plentiful, ominous, and often accurate.”
⁴⁰

But the CIA analysts responsible for the Middle East rejected the intelligence reporting and warnings coming from NSA. Navy
captain Norman Klar, who in 1974 took over as head of the NSA’s G6 office, recalled, “the NIO [the CIA’s national intelligence
officer] refused to accept SIGINT information that an attack was imminent. He insisted it was an exercise, because the Arabs
wouldn’t be ‘stupid enough’ to attack Israel.”
⁴¹
Both DIA and the CIA ignored or paid scant heed to the NSA warnings, and the CIA Watch Committee chose to ignore the data
completely and reported to the White House that war in the Middle East was
not
imminent. The CIA postmortem study concluded, “Those elements of the Intelligence Community responsible for the production
of finished intelligence [notably the CIA!] did not perceive the growing possibility of an Arab attack and thus did not warn
of its imminence.”
⁴²

The CIA protested, after the fact, that its analysts had been swamped by hundreds of unintelligible SIGINT summaries, but
NSA fired back, arguing that if it had been able to get its unvarnished SIGINT summaries through to the White House without
the CIA’s intelligence analysts putting their “spin” on the material, it would have been clear that Egypt and Syria were about
to attack.
⁴³

NSA director Lew Allen “resolved that in the future [he] would ensure that a separate view be presented when the judgment
of SIGINT analysts [differed] from the common [i.e., CIA, DIA, and other agencies’] view.” Allen and his successors fought
furiously to ensure that in future the White House would be fully informed about their agency’s views,
especially
if they conflicted with those of the CIA.
⁴⁴

Norm Klar’s Tour de Force

In February 1974, Frank Raven, head of NSA’s G Group, which was responsible for SIGINT coverage of all noncommunist countries
around the world, gave Norman Klar command of his group’s largest and most important unit, the 400-man G6 office. Klar was
one of NSA’s best cryptanalysts. Trained as a Chinese linguist, he had spent much of his career in the Far East, serving tours
of duty in Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines before returning to Fort Meade in 1971. Raven had initially given him the task
of running the part of G Group that broke the codes and ciphers of India and Pakistan. Much of the intelligence reporting
produced by Klar’s division during the December 1971 war between India and Pakistan had ended up on the desks of President
Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
⁴⁵

Over the next six years, Klar’s unit handled a half-dozen wars and untold numbers of smaller conflicts, including the Turkish
invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the Cuban military interventions in Angola and Ethiopia, the bloody civil war in Lebanon, the
1976 Israeli hostage rescue mission at Entebbe, Uganda, the fall of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, the collapse of the shah
of Iran’s regime and his replacement by the radical cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and
the resulting hostage crisis, and, finally, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Klar later joked that his unit was
NSA’s “crisis management shop,” since nothing that G6 handled was ever routine. “We operated under a microscope . . . sometimes
we were handling two or three high profile crises at the same time with everything we were producing going straight to the
White House.”
⁴⁶

Klar’s unit became the hub of the U.S. intelligence community’s first counterterrorism effort, in 1972, and made the first
breaks into the communications of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the host of competing Palestinian
terrorist organizations in places like Lebanon. In 1973, the unit’s SIGINT helped thwart a plot to bomb Israeli diplomatic
establishments and businesses in New York City, and G6 was instrumental in warning that Palestinian terrorists intended to
assassinate Secretary of State Kissinger during a 1974 visit to Damascus. By 1979, NSA was reading some of Arafat’s most sensitive
cable traffic and listening in on his international telephone calls to great effect.
⁴⁷

Klar’s unit performed well during the civil war in Angola that raged from 1975 through the late 1980s. When the first Cuban
combat troops were sent there in September 1975 to prop up the Soviet-supported Angolan regime, the cryptanalysts in G6 made
daily, highly detailed reports on the Cuban troops and their Soviet military advisers, including information on Cuban combat
losses suffered while they fought with South African forces in late 1975 and early 1976.
⁴⁸