The Secret Sentry (34 page)

A now-retired NSA intelligence officer remembered the next twenty-four hours of his life as “a day in hell.” Like all of his
colleagues, he sat in on countless video and telephone conferences with other senior U.S. and British intelligence officials
and attended one staff meeting after another until he reached the point where he could not remember why he was at the meeting.
When he finally got back to his office, his secretary had a stack of telephone messages that had to be answered. Then there
was a never-ending flow of memos and reports that he had to read and respond to. At midnight, he decided to leave because
he was too exhausted to think coherently. “How I got home without crashing the car, I don’t know.”
²⁶

Nowhere was the blunt-force trauma inflicted by the 9/11 attacks felt more deeply than within NSA’s one-hundred-man counterterrorism
unit, called the Counterterrorism Product Line, whose leader, Bill Gaches, was well qualified for the job, having served from
1998 to 2000 as the deputy chief of NSA’s Office of the Middle East and North Africa, where, one of his former analysts recalled,
“terror was king.”
²⁷
Hayden later described the state of morale in the NSA coun-terterrorism office on September 11 as “emotionally shattered.”
Later that morning, Maureen Baginski, the chief of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, visited the counterterrorism office
and held an impromptu staff meeting, first taking the time to calm the clearly distressed staff, then urging them to get back
to work. Recalling the days of the London blitz, some were busy putting up blackout curtains over the office windows so as
to shield their activities from the outside world.
²⁸

What Hayden and his staff did not know was that messages among al Qaeda officials and sympathizers that had been intercepted
by the agency within minutes of the 9/11 attacks were causing a firestorm at the White House and the Pentagon. A number of
senior Bush administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, were convinced that the attacks were the handiwork
of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and not al Qaeda. Tyler Drumheller, then the head of the CIA Clandestine Service division
responsible for Europe, noted,

Within fifteen minutes of the attacks the National Security Agency intercepted a call from an al Qaeda operative in Asia to
a contact in a former Soviet republic reporting the “good news” of the attacks in New York and on the Pentagon. [CIA director
George J.] Tenet passed that report on to Rumsfeld around midday, but according to notes taken by aides who were with the
Secretary of Defense, he characterized the NSA report as “vague” and said there was “no good basis for hanging hat” on the
fact that al Qaeda had conducted the assaults.
²⁹

The intercept that Drumheller referred to, between a known al Qaeda official in Afghanistan and an unidentified person in
the former Soviet republic of Georgia, was intercepted by NSA at nine fifty-three a.m., less than fifteen minutes after American
Airlines Flight 77 had hit the Pentagon. And despite overwhelming evidence accumulated by the CIA that the hijackers were
known al Qaeda operatives, at two forty p.m. Rumsfeld ordered Pentagon officials to immediately begin preparing plans to launch
retaliatory air strikes on Iraq. In the days that followed, Rumsfeld and a number of other senior administration officials
continued to refuse to accept the fact that the 9/11 attacks had been conducted by Osama bin Laden’s operatives. As it turned
out, this was a portent of things to come.
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The Invasion of Afghanistan

It did not take the Bush administration long to decide where to retaliate for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At a meeting of
the NSC held on the morning of September 13, 2001, President Bush ordered Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to begin preparing
a plan to attack the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, including a range of options up to and including an actual invasion. The
name eventually given to the operation was Enduring Freedom.
³¹

Bush’s decision to begin preparations for an invasion of Afghanistan put NSA director Hayden in a bind. As of September 2001,
NSA’s SIGINT coverage of Afghanistan was not particularly good. The agency’s SIGINT collection resources had been so tightly
stretched prior to 9/11 that it had dedicated only a relatively small amount of its resources to monitoring the communications
of the regime in Kabul, since the Taliban was not a big user of radio or other inter-ceptable forms of communications. Other
than a dozen or so Soviet-made shortwave radios, the Taliban’s military formations used nothing more sophisticated than walkie-talkies
and satellite telephones. There was no cell phone ser-vice inside Afghanistan, the Internet had been banned by the Taliban
regime as “unholy,” and the single microwave telephone link between Kabul and Pakistan was so unreliable that it frustrated
the NSA intercept operators trying to monitor it as much as it did the Afghan officials who depended on it to communicate
with the outside world.
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NSA also faced a linguistic shortfall: It had only two or three individuals on staff who could speak the principal languages
spoken in the country— Pashto, Dari, Uzbek, and Turkmen. The agency had to rely on decoding the diplomatic messages of countries
that maintained embassies in Kabul (the United States had no embassy in Afghanistan), and on intelligence-sharing arrangements
with a number of foreign intelligence services.
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Completely in depen dent of NSA, the CIA was running a clandestine SIGINT collection effort inside Afghanistan that was slightly
more successful than NSA’s. In late 1997, the CIA had delivered to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance forces some off-the-shelf
SIGINT intercept equipment, which they used to monitor the radio and walkie-talkie traffic of the Taliban and al Qaeda forces
arrayed against them in northern Afghanistan. More equipment was surreptitiously flown in by CIA teams in the summer of 1999.
The problem was that prior to 9/11, there was no full-time CIA liaison officer assigned to the Northern Alliance, so the intercepts
were picked up by the CIA only sporadically, usually months after the messages were intercepted.
³⁴

The U.S. military’s SIGINT assets were also minimal. The army was slowly in the pro cess of revamping its tactical SIGINT
capabilities with new equipment, but until such time as thesenew systems were fielded, the army’s field units were almost
completely dependent on NSA’s “national systems” for most of the intelligence they got.
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Linguists were in dreadfully short supply within the U.S. military’s SIGINT units because of a lack of recruitment and personnel
retention. As of 9/11, the army was missing half of its Arabic linguists, a critical shortfall that obviously could not be
rectified overnight and that would have unforeseen consequences in the months that followed.
³⁶

Right after 9/11, NSA’s principal listening post covering the Middle East and Near East, the Gordon Regional Security Operations
Center (GRSOC) at Fort Gordon, in Georgia, issued an urgent request for all available Arabic linguists to augment its collection
operations. It was just one of many NSA and military SIGINT units making such a request, so as an emergency measure the U.S.
Army decided to use Arabic linguists from tactical units based in the United States to augment GRSOC’s SIGINT operations.
Within weeks, twelve Arabic linguists belonging to the SIGINT company of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment arrived at Fort
Gordon on a 180-day temporary deployment. It turned out that none of the linguists could be used. They did not have the proper
security clearances and weren’t highly proficient translators. It took almost three months to polygraph all these soldiers
and upgrade their language training to the point where they could be used in an operational capacity at GRSOC.
³⁷

The same problems handicapped the U.S. military’s tactical SIGINT units destined for use in Afghanistan. The Defense Language
Institute in Monterey, California, did not even begin teaching courses in Pashto and Dari until October 15, 2001, a week after
the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began. At the time of the invasion, only a tiny handful of specially trained Pashto-speaking
Green Beret SIGINT collectors assigned to the Fifth Special Forces Group at Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, were up to speed,
and they would perform brilliantly inside Afghanistan in the months that followed.
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But that was all that was available.

The Art of Improvisation

So as in virtually every other world crisis that had preceded this one, NSA was forced to rapidly improvise. Recruiters from
NSA, the military, and every other branch of the U.S. intelligence community scoured Fremont, California, which had the largest
population of Afghan expatriates in the United States. Weeks after 9/11, several dozen Afghan Americans from the Fremont area
had signed contracts for substantial sums of money and had quickly been put on planes to the new front lines in the war on
terrorism.
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Less than two weeks after 9/11, a special Afghanistan Cell was created within the agency’s SIGINT Directorate, headed by army
lieutenant colonel Ronald Stephens, who was given the thankless job of trying to resurrect overnight NSA’s dormant SIGINT
collection effort against Afghanistan. Richard Berardino, the head of NSOC, set up a special Afghan Desk on his operations
floor to correlate and report to the agency’s consumers any intercepts concerning Afghanistan. Teams of NSA and U.S. military
linguists and SIGINT collectors and analysts hastily boarded flights at Dulles International Airport and Baltimore-Washington
International Airport bound for Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kuwait, Turkey, Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia to beef up NSA’s
thin presence in the region. The agency’s SIGINT satellites and listening posts were ordered to drop less important targets
and instead train their antennae on Afghanistan. NSA, in conjunction with its En glish, Canadian, and Australian SIGINT partners,
was scanning virtually every satellite telephone call coming in and out of Afghanistan, hoping against hope that it might
catch Osama bin Laden or one of his lieutenants talking on the phone. The Army’s 513th Military Intelligence Brigade hastily
sent 200 SIGINT and HUMINT collectors to Kuwait in late September 2001 to augment the 120 SIGINT collectors already there.
⁴⁰
A navy task force was hurriedly dispatched to the waters off the coast of Pakistan, including a complete marine expeditionary
unit, which was essentially a reinforced marine battalion with air support. Aboard one of the ships in that force was a large
contingent of U.S. Navy SIGINT collectors, who trained their ship’s sophisticated radio intercept antennae on Afghanistan
once they came within range.
⁴¹

No matter how many resources, human and technical, the NSA could muster in a few weeks, it could not produce meaningful intelligence
about Afghanistan before the beginning of U.S. military operations on October 7, 2001. The CIA worked out a way to fill the
intelligence gap by striking a deal with the Northern Alliance officials for SIGINT collection in return for hundreds of thousands
of dollars’ worth of new and improved SIGINT collection equipment, a deal that would pay huge dividends for the CIA in the
weeks that followed.
⁴²

On Sunday night, October 7, offensive military operations against Afghanistan began with air strikes against thirty-one targets,
including major Taliban military units, command posts, communications sites, and early-warning radar and air defense units.
⁴³
Not surprisingly, the Taliban regime’s scanty communications system collapsed under the weight of the relentless bombing.
In a matter of a couple of hours virtually every communications site and telephone relay facility inside Afghanistan was destroyed,
including the telephone switching center at Lataband, twenty-two miles east of Kabul, which connected the capital city with
the outside world. A former NSA analyst recalled that from October 7 onward, Mullah Omar and his fellow Taliban leaders could
communicate with their military commanders only by satellite telephone, which, of course, NSA could easily intercept.
⁴⁴

Even though SIGINT was not much help in finding bin Laden, the quantity and quality of NSA’s SIGINT coverage of the Taliban
rapidly improved in early October, thanks largely to the commanders’ incessant chattering about the most sensitive information
over satellite phones and walkie-talkies.
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From the time the U.S. air campaign began, one of the top SIGINT targets assigned to NSA was the radio traffic of the Taliban’s
elite Fifty-fifth Brigade, which was based in a former Afghan army camp at Rishikor, southwest of Kabul. A detachment of the
brigade was stationed in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Widely considered to be the best combat unit in the Taliban
military, the Fifty-fifth Brigade was comprised entirely of foreign fighters, including a large number of Arabs who were members
of al Qaeda and had volunteered to fight with the Taliban. The Fifty-fifth Brigade was also an easy target for NSA because
unlike other Taliban units it was well equipped with modern radios, walkie-talkies, and satellite phones, many of which were
personally paid for by bin Laden. All of the brigade’s officers were Arabs, which made monitoring its radio traffic much easier
since NSA had plenty of Arabic linguists.
⁴⁶
This was an instance of SIGINT (employing resources like air force AC-130H Spectre gunships, each of which carried a contingent
of Arabic linguists on board) contributing directly to the destruction of a key enemy unit.

One of the Arabic linguists who flew on the Spectre missions recalled, “Every time one of the brigade’s commanders went on
the air, we quickly triangulated the location of his radio transmission and blasted the shit out of his location with our
Gatling gun . . . Once our bird was finished chewing up the enemy positions, there usually were no more radio transmissions
heard coming from that location.”
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