The Secret Sentry (8 page)

Despite providing timely intelligence, NSA’s overall per formance revealed that the agency’s hidebound bureaucracy had trouble
reacting rapidly to extraordinary circumstances. NSA was roundly criticized for the intelligence material that it produced.
A declassified NSA history notes, “As for crisis response, all was chaos. The cryptologic community proved incapable of marshaling
its forces in a flexible fashion to deal with developing trouble spots. The events of the year did not demonstrate success—
they simply provided a case study to learn from.”
¹⁵

The Samford Era at NSA

On November 23, 1956, General Ralph Canine retired after almost forty years in the U.S. Army. His replacement as NSA director
was Lieutenant General John Samford of the U.S. Air Force. Born in tiny Hagerman, New Mexico, on August 29, 1905, Samford
graduated from West Point in 1928 and joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. During World War II, he served as the chief of staff
of the Eighth Air Force from 1942 until 1944, then at the Pentagon as a senior intelligence officer. After the war, Samford
held a series of senior intelligence billets, becoming the chief of U.S. Air Force intelligence in 1951. He held this position
until becoming NSA’s vice director in July 1956, then director four months later, in November 1956.
¹⁶

As head of air force intelligence, Samford was well known as a defense hawk and one of the primary proponents within the air
force of the idea that the Soviets were seeking strategic nuclear superiority over the United States. Many senior NSA staff
also remembered Samford’s strident opposition to the formation of NSA in October 1952. When he was announced as the new director,
many of the civilian staff at Fort Meade were alarmed about what his appointment would mean for the agency.
¹⁷

But Samford proved to be a pleasant surprise. Polished and thoughtful, he quickly became a convert to the idea that the rapidly
growing NSA would someday be a superpower within the American intelligence community. His quiet but diligent work on behalf
of the agency earned him the informal moniker Slamming Sammy among his staff. Samford also moved rapidly to heal the gaping
wounds that had developed in the relationship between NSA and the CIA during Canine’s tumultuous tenure. A declassified NSA
history notes, “Samford was a consummate diplomat, and he probably gained more by soft-soaping the downtown intelligence people
than Canine could have done through head-on collisions.”
¹⁸

Forward! Ever Forward!

Just as his predecessor had, Samford found that the Soviet Union ate up the vast majority of NSA’s SIGINT collection resources.
But like his predecessor’s, Samford’s tenure was marked by the continuing failure of the agency’s cryptanalysts to break into
the Soviet high-grade ciphers. Just as in baseball, NSA’s senior leadership tried to shake up the management of their cryptanalytic
effort to see if that would produce results, but to no avail.

By 1958, a whopping 54 percent of NSA’s SIGINT collection resources were dedicated to monitoring military and civilian targets
inside the Soviet Union. But NSA’s cryptanalysts had actually lost ground since the Korean War. The Russians put a series
of new and improved cipher machines into service, each of which was harder to solve than the machines they replaced. And the
communications traffic generated by these machines remained impenetrable. The Soviets also continued to shift an ever-increasing
percentage of their secret communications from the airwaves to telegraph lines, buried cables, and micro wave radio-relay
systems, which was a simple and effective way of keeping this traffic away from NSA’s thousands of radio intercept operators.
¹⁹

NSA and the U-2 Overflight Program

Even if NSA’s cryptanalysts were stymied by the Russian high-grade ciphers, other branches of NSA were producing intelligence.
One of the most important, albeit unheralded, missions performed by NSA during General Samford’s tenure was providing SIGINT
support to the CIA’s U-2 reconnaissance aircraft that were engaged in secretly overflying the USSR. Declassified documents
show that between April 1956 and May 1960, the CIA conducted twenty-four U-2 overflights of the USSR, which produced some
of the most important intelligence information about what the Russians were up for the information-starved American intelligence
analysts back in Washington.
²⁰

Although it is not recognized in CIA literature on the U-2 program, newly declassified documents show that over time a close
and symbiotic relationship developed between NSA and CIA. NSA derived incredibly valuable intelligence about Soviet military
capabilities by monitoring how the Soviets reacted to each U-2 overflight. And over time, the CIA increasingly came to depend
on intelligence information collected by NSA in order to target the U-2 over-flights, with a declassified NSA history noting
that as time went by SIGINT “became more and more a cue card for U-2 missions.”
²¹

The genesis of the NSA-CIA relationship regarding the U-2 program dates back to a Top Secret May 1956 agreement between the
CIA and NSA, whereby NSA’s listening posts situated around the Soviet periphery were tasked with closely monitoring Soviet
air defense reactions to each U-2 over-flight mission by intercepting the radio transmissions of Soviet radar operators as
they tracked the CIA reconnaissance aircraft flying deep inside their country. The American radio intercept operators could
copy the radio transmissions of Soviet radar operators deep inside the USSR, in some cases thousands of miles away. This meant
that American radio intercept operators in England and Germany could listen to Soviet radar operators in the Urals or deep
inside Kazakhstan as they excitedly tracked the flight paths of the U-2s. A former U.S. Air Force intercept operator recalled,
“We could track our U-2s using the Soviet’s own radar, long after our U-2s were out of the range of our own long range radar
stations.”
²²

The intercepts stemming from the U-2 overflights proved to be an intelligence bonanza for the analysts in NSA’s Soviet Air
Division, headed by a veteran U.S. Air Force SIGINT officer named Colonel Harry Towler Jr. Between 1956 and 1960, Towler’s
division produced reams of reports detailing the strength, readiness, and capabilities of the Soviet air defense forces. Intercepts
collected during the early U-2 overflights in the summer of 1956 re-vealed that the accuracy of the Soviet radars was not
very good, but over time their accuracy improved markedly as new systems were introduced. The intercepts also revealed that
the command and control network of the huge Soviet air defense system was cumbersome, and oftentimes very slow to react to
extraordinary situations. A former NSA analyst involved in the program recalled that by correlating intercepts of Soviet radar
tracking transmissions with intercepts of Russian early-warning radars, he could literally “time with a stopwatch” how fast
the Russians reacted to each individual U-2 overflight. SIGINT also revealed that the Soviet air defense fighter force was
larger than previously believed. Every time a U-2 conducted an overflight of the USSR, the Soviets scrambled dozens of fighter
interceptors from different bases to try to shoot the aircraft down. By monitoring the air-to-ground radio traffic between
the fighters and their home bases, NSA was able to identify dozens of previously unknown Soviet air defense fighter regiments
throughout the USSR.
²³

The U-2 intercepts also revealed how poor the operating capabilities of the Soviet fighters and their pilots sometimes were.
While in training in the U.S. during the 1960s, a former USAFSS Russian linguist listened to a training tape of intercepted
PVO air-to-ground radio transmissions during an attempt by Russian MiG fighters to shoot down a CIA U-2 reconnaissance aircraft
flying over Russia. The linguist recalled that one of the MiG fighters flew too high, which resulted in the plane’s jet engines
flaming out. The pilot could not restart his engine at such a high altitude, and his plane plummeted to the earth. As caught
on the tape, the Russian MiG pilot spent his last seconds alive screaming “
Beda! Beda!
” (Mayday! Mayday!) into his radio set before his plane crashed and the radio transmission abruptly went dead.
²⁴

The Fool’s Errand: NSA and the 1960 U-2 Shootdown

At eight thirty-six on the morning of May 1, 1960, a Russian SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile (SAM) fired by a battery
of the Fifty-seventh Anti-Aircraft Rocket Brigade, commanded by Major Mikhail Voronov, shot down a CIA U-2 reconnaissance
aircraft piloted by Francis Gary Powers deep inside Russia near the city of Sverdlovsk.
²⁵

NSA was deeply involved in all aspects of Gary Powers’s ill-fated mission. Many of the top targets that the mission was supposed
to cover had been identified by SIGINT, including suspected Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch sites
at Polyarnyy Ural, Yur’ya, and Verkhnyaya Salda and an alleged missile production facility in Sverdlovsk. But one of the main
targets of Powers’s overflight mission was to confirm reports received from NSA that the Russians were building an ICBM launch
site in northern Russia somewhere along the Vologda-Arkhangel’sk railroad in the vicinity of the frigid village of Plesetsk.
As it turned out, the SIGINT reporting was correct: The Russians had begun building their first operational ICBM site at Plesetsk
in July 1957 and had completed construction in mid-1959. Between December 1959 and February 1960, Norwegian listening posts
in northern Norway had intercepted Russian radio traffic suggesting that Soviet missile activity was then being conducted
at Plesetsk, which Power’s mission was supposed to confirm.
²⁶

As with all previous U-2 overflights of the USSR, NSA was able to monitor Soviet air defense reactions to the mission. The
man at NSA headquarters responsible for running this operation was Henry Fenech, who headed NSA’s Soviet Air Defense Branch.
Well before Powers’s U-2 took off from Peshawar airfield in northern Pakistan, Fenech had become concerned about the safety
of the U-2 aircraft. There were clear signs appearing in SIGINT that the Soviet air defenses were getting better, and that
they were getting close to being able to shoot down a U-2.
²⁷

Powers’s mission did not begin well. Even before his U-2 reached the Soviet border on May 1, intercepted Soviet air defense
tracking communications showed that his plane had been detected and was being closely tracked by Russian early-warning radars.
While the U-2 streaked northward into the heart of Russia, NSA intercept operators in Karamursel, Turkey, listened intently
as Soviet radar operators continued to track the plane. Then something went terribly wrong. The intercepts of Soviet air defense
radar tracking showed that just north of Sverdlovsk, Powers’s aircraft descended from over sixty-five thousand feet to somewhere
between thirty thousand and forty thousand feet, changed course to head back toward Sverdlovsk, then disappeared completely
off the Soviet radar screens thirty-five minutes later. Fenech could only report to the CIA that the U-2 “had been lost due
to unexplained causes.” But in a follow-up report, Fenech’s analysts stated that based on intercepts of Soviet radar tracking
communications, they believed that Powers’s aircraft might have been hit by the SAM at an altitude of between thirty thousand
and forty thousand feet while descending, and not at an altitude of sixty-five thousand feet as Powers claimed.
²⁸

The downing of the U-2 was a major diplomatic disaster. It took place just two weeks before Eisenhower (who had to authorize
all such overflights and had very reluctantly allowed this one—to take place no later than May 2) was to meet with Soviet
leader Nikita Khrushchev for a crucial summit meeting in Geneva. Not only did the Soviets capture Powers after he parachuted
from his doomed aircraft, but they also displayed pieces of the latter (along with Powers) in public. The summit meeting,
like the U-2, was shot down by the Russians. And a very unhappy Eisenhower wanted an explanation of what had gone wrong.

Fenech’s report stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy, with CIA officials vehemently denying its conclusions. But it was
not until Powers returned to the United States in February 11, 1962, after being traded for convicted Soviet spy Rudolph Abel,
that NSA “got its day in court.” Admiral Laurence Frost— who had replaced General Samford as director of NSA in November 1960—
and his analysts attended a contentious CIA board of inquiry, convened on February 19, at which Fenech was grilled for hours
by board member John Bross, a former lawyer and a veteran CIA officer, about his conclusions, and Fenech continued to insist
that the intercepted Soviet air defense tracking showed that Powers was flying much lower than he claimed. The CIA board maintained,
however, that the Soviet radar operators had been mistaken about the altitude. So on February 27, 1962, the board sent a Top
Secret report to CIA director John McCone and President John Kennedy that cleared Powers of any culpability or negligence,
concluding that “the evidence establishes overwhelmingly that Powers’ account was a truthful account.”
²⁹

Louis Tordella, NSA’s deputy director, was incensed, telling CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston that “the markedly hostile
nature of much of the questioning indicated that the Board had already decided on a course of action which was not supported
by the NSA produced materials.” But the politically astute Tordella ultimately conceded that the board had arrived at the
“best” decision— i.e., one that protected the reputation of the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community.
³⁰

CHAPTER 5

The Crisis Years

SIGINT and the Kennedy Administration:

1961–1963

It may not be war, but it sure as hell ain’t peace.

—MAJOR GENERAL STEVEN ARNOLD

Jack Frost’s 600 Days

On January 20, 1961, John Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth president of the United States. His national security advisers
quickly discovered that NSA was the most important, the largest, and the most expensive component of the U.S. intelligence
community. With a budget of $654 million and employing 59,000 military and civilian personnel, NSA was truly a behemoth. By
way of comparison, the CIA consisted of only 16,685 personnel, with a budget of $401.6 million.
¹

Leaders in the intelligence community had worried about the tendency of NSA’s director, Lieutenant General John Samford, to
focus on meeting the demands of the Pentagon rather than on making NSA a strong national intelligence organization. A search
had been mounted to find a successor who could do just that.
²

Vice Admiral Laurence “Jack” Frost seemed to have the requisite qualifications for the job. Quiet and soft-spoken, Frost had
replaced Samford as the director of NSA on November 24, 1960. A native of Fayetteville, Arkansas, Frost was a 1926 graduate
of the U.S. Naval Academy. He spent his formative years in the navy as a gunnery and communications officer, and he was in
command of the destroyer USS
Greer
when it was attacked on September 4, 1941, by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic while on a mail run to Iceland, a seminal
event that helped propel the United States into World War II. During the war, Frost commanded a destroyer and served as a
communications officer in the Pacific. He returned to Washington in September 1945 and became an intelligence officer, commanding
the unit of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) that managed the navy’s SIGINT processing and reporting efforts, then ONI’s
Intelligence Estimates Division. After more sea duty, Frost served as NSA’s chief of staff from 1953 to 1955, then became
the director of ONI on May 16, 1956. He remained at the helm until becoming NSA director in 1960.
³

But Frost turned out to be a disaster as head of NSA. During his twenty-month tenure, the vice admiral, used to naval discipline
and unquestioning obedience to orders, soon found that his civilian staffers would not toe the line, so he surrounded himself
with some naval officers who would. Senior civilian managers dubbed them the Navy Cabal and saw Frost as a threat to their
management control over the agency. In response, his senior civilian staff fought him on policy issues and began sabotaging
many of his initiatives behind his back.
⁴

Frost also never developed a good rapport with the Kennedy administration, which made it difficult for him to protect NSA’s
in dependence from the encroachment of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his top deputies as well as the CIA, headed
by John McCone. By the spring of 1962, McNa-mara was fed up with Frost and fired him. Today it is hard to find former NSA
officials who have anything good to say about Vice Admiral Frost.

NSA Enters the War in Vietnam

At the time the Kennedy administration entered the White House, in January 1961, NSA was devoting few resources to monitoring
events in Asia. Of the agency’s total SIGINT collection resources, 50 percent were devoted to the Soviet Union, 8.4 percent
to Asian communist targets, and 7.6 percent to noncommunist countries elsewhere around the world, which in NSA parlance were
known as the ALLO (all other) nations. The remaining 34 percent was working staff positions and other esoteric collection
functions, such as electronic intelligence.
⁵

The man heading NSA’s SIGINT collection operations in the Far East was Dr. Lawrance Shinn, who had been chief of NSA’s Office
of Asiatic Communist Countries (ACOM) since 1959. Like many of his colleagues at the time, Larry Shinn was not a professional
cryptologist. The holder of a B.S. degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in bacteriology from the
University of Pittsburgh, Shinn had joined the U.S. Navy cryptologic orga-nization during World War II. He quickly demonstrated
a modest talent for code breaking but even more impressive skills as a manager, which led to his meteoric rise after the war
within AFSA, then NSA.
⁶

As of 1961, the vast majority of Shinn’s SIGINT collection and analytic resources were focused on mainland China, with a smaller
effort targeting North Korea. NSA had a small number of SIGINT intercept positions at its two listening posts in the Philippines
covering North Vietnam and Viet Cong guerrilla activities in South Vietnam, though those facilities devoted more of their
resources to China traffic. Back at Fort Meade, what SIGINT reporting was being produced conclusively showed that the Viet
Cong insurgency was being directed and supported by North Vietnam through a clandestine radio network that extended from Hanoi
to 114 Viet Cong radio stations spread throughout South Vietnam.
⁷

Until 1960, NSA was able to read with relative ease the high-level diplomatic and military cipher systems of North Vietnam.
But the agency’s window into these communications closed quickly. In the fall of that year, the North Vietnamese began changing
all of their codes to a new unbreakable cipher system called KTB. The first systems to “go black” were all of the high-level
North Vietnamese government and military ciphers, and over the next two years North Vietnam converted all of the ciphers used
by its military to KTB. The first changes in Viet Cong cipher usage came in the fall of 1961, and then on April 14, 1962,
all one-hundred-plus Viet Cong radio transmitters in South Vietnam “executed a major, nearly total communications and cryptographic
change on their military and political-military networks.” All high-level North Vietnamese and Viet Cong ciphers became unreadable
to the cryptanalysts at NSA, forcing the agency to rely, for the rest of the Vietnam War, on the exploitation of low-level
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong cipher systems, plaintext intercepts, and traffic analysis.
⁸

In the summer of 1960, the increasing intensity of the Viet Cong insurrection in South Vietnam forced the U.S. intelligence
community to devote more resources to monitoring Viet Cong activity. Since existing security regulations barred the United
States from giving direct SIGINT support to the South Vietnamese government, the CIA chief of station in Taiwan, Ray Cline,
was asked by Washington to see if the Taiwanese intelligence services “would assist the South Vietnamese in methods for collecting
intelligence, including signals interception and the flying of clandestine missions behind enemy lines.”
⁹
But the Taiwanese personnel ultimately sent to South Vietnam spent most of their time intercepting Chinese military radio
traffic, at which they excelled, and made no real contribution to the war effort. Efforts by the commander of the U.S. Military
Assistance Group (MAAG) in Vietnam, Lieutenant General L. C. McGarr, to convince the newly installed Kennedy administration
of the need to provide the South Vietnamese with SIGINT equipment were met by stiff resistance from the U.S. intelligence
community, especially NSA, which was naturally reluctant to provide the South Vietnamese with sensitive American SIGINT technology.
¹⁰

In March 1961, the U.S. Intelligence Board (USIB) approved a wide range of new clandestine intelligence collection and covert
action programs, including a classified CIA program to drop large numbers of agents into North Vietnam, as well as a sizable
expansion of NSA’s SIGINT collection program for both Viet Cong and North Vietnamese communications. The USIB also approved
a parallel program that authorized the ASA to train South Vietnamese military personnel in SIGINT collection. On April 29,
1961, President Kennedy and the NSC approved the plan, including giving limited intelligence information derived from SIGINT
to the South Vietnamese military.
¹¹

On May 12, 1961, McGarr, Ambassador Frederick Nolting Jr., and the CIA’s Saigon chief of station, William Colby, obtained
South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem’s approval to deploy American SIGINT troops to South Vietnam. The next day, the first
contingent of ninety-three ASA personnel, calling themselves the Third Radio Research Unit under the command of Lieutenant
Colonel William Cochrane, flew into Tan Son Nhut Air Base outside Saigon and moved its Morse intercept operators into vans
parked alongside the runways. Their presence was to be kept top secret. The army SIGINT troops wore civilian clothes and were
barred from carry ing military ID cards in order to provide cover, which must have deceived very few, since all of them wore
sidearms and carried M-1 rifles everywhere they went. For additional cover, their medical rec-ords were stamped, “If injured
or killed in combat, report as training accident in the Philippines.”
¹²
To preserve security as well as cover, Washington tactfully declined to give in to the South Vietnamese government and military’s
demands for full access to the unit’s operations spaces and the intelligence information that it produced.
¹³

But as of the fall of 1961, the SIGINT effort was producing virtually no hard intelligence about the strength, capabilities,
and activities of the Viet Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam. A Top Secret November 1961 report to the White House by General
Maxwell Taylor recommended that NSA “adjust its priorities of effort and allocations of personnel and material, both in Washington
and Vietnam, as required to break Viet Cong communications codes.” His findings, coupled with the rapidly deteriorating military
situation in South Vietnam, led President Kennedy to authorize yet another dramatic increase in the number of American troops
and advisers in South Vietnam. As part of the buildup, an additional 279 ASA personnel were ordered to be deployed to South
Vietnam by January 14, 1962, to augment the Third Radio Research Unit.
¹⁴

Operation Mongoose

Pursuant to a November 30, 1961, directive from Kennedy, the CIA began planning a large-scale covert operation called Mongoose,
whose purpose was to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba through a combination of guerrilla attacks by CIA-trained Cuban
exiles and the judicious use of political, economic, and psychological warfare.
¹⁵
This regime change plan naturally had the full support of the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community, with the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff going so far as to write, “The United States cannot tolerate [the] permanent existence of a communist
government in the Western Hemi sphere.”
¹⁶

Between January and March 1962, all branches of the U.S. intelligence community, including NSA, were tasked with increased
coverage of Cuba to support the CIA’s Mongoose covert action operations. NSA’s initial intelligence collection effort was
relatively small. Then, in response to White House demands that “special intelligence [i.e., SIGINT] assets be exploited more
fully,” the agency sent a plan to Secretary of Defense McNamara in November 1961, calling for additional intercept positions
to monitor Cuban communications. This required placing the newly commissioned NSA spy ship USS
Oxford
off the northern coast of Cuba and hiring a dozen anticommunist Cuban exiles to translate the intercepted message traffic.
This plan and another, more expansive version submitted in February 1962 were quickly approved by Mc-Namara.
¹⁷

Juanita Morris Moody, chief of the Office of Non-Communist Nations (B1), had the responsibility of running SIGINT collection
operations against Cuba. As a woman holding a senior management position, with no college degree or advanced technical background,
she was a rarity in that era at NSA. Born in Morven, North Carolina, she attended Western Carolina College in 1942–1943 but
never graduated. She left school in April 1943 and volunteered to join the war effort. Within a month, she found herself assigned
to SSA at Arlington Hall Station as a code clerk. While waiting for her security clearance to come through, she took a number
of unclassified courses in cryptanalysis, in which she demonstrated her flair for code breaking, and she subsequently excelled
in breaking complex cipher systems, such as a high-level German one-time pad cipher system. By the end of the war, she had
risen from code clerk to office head. At the urging of her supervisor, she decided to stay on with the ASA. In only three
years, she advanced to the position of chief of operations for one of ASA’s most important operational units. In subsequent
years, she headed a number of important operational units at NSA, including the division that specialized in the solution
of Soviet manual cipher systems.
¹⁸

Much of NSA’s early effort against Cuba was driven by the intelligence requirements of the CIA, not only for its own analytic
purposes but also to support Operation Mongoose.
¹⁹
For example, declassified documents show that the CIA’s Clandestine Service was anxious to detect dissension within the Castro
regime or the Cuban populace through NSA’s monitoring of Cuban police and internal security force communications.
²⁰
In February 1962, a small team of SIGINT analysts belonging to ASA were sent to the CIA’s newly opened interrogation center
at Opa-Locka, Florida, the Caribbean Admissions Center, to gather intelligence information needed to support the SIGINT effort
against Cuba by interrogating Cuban refugees and defectors.
²¹
Then there were the requirements of the FBI, which in 1962 wanted NSA to send it copies of all Western Union telegrams between
the United States and Cuba, particularly those that identified which U.S. companies were still doing business with Cuba or
revealed the names of Americans traveling there illegally.
²²