AFSA had better luck during the Korean War, intercepting high-level North Korean broadcasts. To the astonishment of SIGINT specialists, North Korea was broadcasting details of its most sensitive military operations with no encryption. When the North Koreans finally got wise, AFSA made short work of almost every cipher, achieving what Matthew Aid, author of The Secret Sentry, called “one of the most important code-breaking accomplishments of the twentieth century.”7
But there were also failures—three hundred thousand of them, to be exact, when China inserted thirty divisions into Korea. For comparison, that is the equivalent of the entire U.S. Marine Corps, from cooks to snipers, plus fifty thousand.
How did China do it? The same way Alexander, Caesar, Washington, and Napoleon did it—without radios. When there are no signals broadcast, there are no signals to intercept. Worse yet, before the Chinese incursion in Korea, AFSA had almost entirely neglected the Chinese military, and even if they had listening posts diligently recording and decrypting SIGINT, they lacked linguists to translate the intercepts.8
The year 1951 marked the beginning of a long stalemate in the war, and during this time the Chinese helped upgrade North Korea’s encryption and transmission protocols. Chinese ciphers remained a mystery for AFSA, crippling the American war machine, which had become accustomed during World War II to an overwhelming SIGINT advantage. The unbreakable codes of the Soviet Union remained an alarming gap in U.S. national security. Reforms were attempted, but internal turf wars among the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force crippled the organization.
Affixing his signature to a revision of National Security Council Directive No. 9, titled “Communications Intelligence” and dated December 29, 1952, President Truman formalized and enumerated the powers of a new National Security Agency (NSA), which would become one of the most secret organizations in the world: “The communications intelligence (COMINT) activities of the United States are a national responsibility, and they must be so organized and managed as to exploit to the maximum the available resources in all participating departments and agencies and to satisfy the legitimate intelligence requirements of all such departments and agencies.” Its charter sought to address the failures of AFSA. The new agency’s mission: “To provide effective, unified organization and control of the communications intelligence activities of the United States conducted against foreign governments.”
The directive unambiguously decreed that the mission of the NSA is special, and that its activities require that
they be treated in all respects as being outside the framework of other or general intelligence activities. Orders, directives, policies, or recommendations of any authority of the Executive Branch relating to the collection, production, security, handling, dissemination, or utilization of intelligence, and/or classified material, shall not be applicable to COMINT activities, unless specifically so stated and issued by competent departmental or agency authority represented on the [management] Board.9
To appease FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—always a pressing concern—the directive concluded with the statement, “Nothing in this directive shall be construed to encroach upon or interfere with the unique responsibilities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the field of internal security.”
With three months left in office, President Truman, the man who loathed the activities of the FBI and the military’s Office of Strategic Services—who in fact had once compared the organizations to the Gestapo—established the two most secret spy organizations in the history of the world: the Central Intelligence Agency (1947), which not only collected intelligence in foreign lands, but covertly worked to overthrow governments and reshape nation-states, and the NSA, an organization whose sole purpose is to listen to everyone in the world. Hoover’s FBI worked in the gray. General Walter Bedell Smith’s CIA worked in the black. And the NSA worked invisibly, so much so that its abbreviation would be recognized unofficially as “No Such Agency.”
Back to the matter of the Black Chamber. The end of World War I and the end of SIGINT operations meant national hero Herbert Yardley was soon out of a job. A man obsessed with puzzles and probability, he was also an accomplished poker player. But gambling takes money, and without his healthy government stipend, he did what every notable bureaucrat does when leaving federal service (especially those terminated with such casual disregard): he wrote a book.
The American Black Chamber was an instant best seller, compelling not only for its remarkable story but also for the information revealed. Yardley didn’t hold back, exposing in detail the most important tools in the government’s workshop. He didn’t just pull back the curtain of the secrecy apparatus; he carefully aimed a spotlight at every key aspect of America’s cryptographic capabilities. It should go without saying that the book was a blockbuster in Japan, for all the wrong reasons.
Yardley was threatened but never charged with espionage for fear that in prosecution he might disclose even more classified information. This is a recurring problem for prosecutors when deciding whether to bring traitors, double agents, and leakers to trial. Once on the stand, spies are obliged to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. For the intelligence community, that’s a bit too much truth for comfort.∗
In the case of Yardley, the damage was done. Japan diverted massive resources to strengthening its cryptographic program, and the United States, now staring down the barrel of renewed hostility with the Japanese and a second looming world war, had to start from zero in its codebreaking operation. And Yardley’s life had one more secret to reveal. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the United States seized Japanese Foreign Ministry documents for archival in the Library of Congress. In the late 1960s, the NSA took a hard look at Yardley’s activities and verified a suspected but never-confirmed bombshell: an “internal Foreign Ministry memorandum saying that the Japanese paid [Yardley] $7,000 for copies of deciphered Japanese messages and cryptanalytic techniques.”10 This was three years before the publication of The American Black Chamber.
One thing this story underlines is the importance of carefully choosing who holds a security clearance and has access to sensitive material. Not everyone with a clearance is susceptible to bribery or willing to betray his or her country out of spite. Some good men and women fall victim to blackmail. The SF-86 security clearance application, currently 120 pages in length, provides a penalty of “fines and/or up to five years of imprisonment” for lying. In addition, those caught making false statements on an application for clearance are candidates for disqualification. People who would risk jail time or their jobs to protect a personal secret might well reveal someone else’s for the same reason. In that regard, background investigations are a way for the would-be handlers of state secrets to lay it all on the table—to tell the U.S. government everything there is to know, before foreign agents find out first and use it as leverage.
In many instances, even absolute transparency can result in a candidate being denied clearance. Before 1995, homosexuality was considered an immediate disqualifier for a perceived risk of blackmail.11 Hard drug abuse can be an immediate disqualifier. (Former brewers of crank might take note that while many federal agencies require subjects to submit to a polygraph examination, the military does not.) The state’s dogmatic pursuit of those pure in thought and deed sometimes comes at the expense of those well qualified but with a slip in judgment. It also costs federal agencies access to those with real-world connections or experience in the criminal underworld. This policy of “clean” sources notably redounded to the detriment of national security in 2001. Rare is the man with both Mullah Omar on speed dial and the clean hands for government clearance.
This mentality doesn’t apply only to aspiring G-men in starched white shirts and conservative neckties. In 1995, it was taken to its natural endpoint when John Deutch, former director of central intelligence, issued an order forcing CIA case officers to seek bureaucratic approval before fielding agents with significant criminal backgrounds.∗,12 Whi
le unsavory persons could still be hired for covert activities, the policy (drafted in a period of relative peace) in effect warned career officers away from taking unnecessary risks. In 2002, Deutch defended the discredited policy, writing in Foreign Policy, “Is the potential gain from the information obtained worth the cost that might be associated with doing business with a person who may be a murderer, rapist, or the like?”13 Those desperate to infiltrate and inveigle members of the Taliban would answer without hesitation: yes. In 2002, George Tenet, director of the CIA, rescinded the Deutch order.14
Today there is no shortage of Americans with a security clearance. According to Top Secret America, an investigation by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin that charted the expansion of secrecy after 9/11, 854,000 people hold a Top Secret clearance, “nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C.”15 In 2009, the Government Accountability Office reported a staggering 2.4 million people with some level of clearance.16 This report even excluded “some of those with clearances who work in areas of national intelligence.”17 (Such a figure, as presented, would equal the population of Chicago.)
With so many secret keepers, it is remarkable how well the secrecy apparatus has kept classified material that might be devastating to the state under wraps. The Bradley Manning WikiLeaks incident of 2010 is heretofore a black swan event. Its execution and impact was astonishing, yet in retrospect somehow obvious and inevitable. More astonishing, perhaps, is that the U.S. government seemed to have no contingency plans or response mechanisms in place. Manning wasn’t cashing in. He wasn’t attempting to overthrow the Republic. He wasn’t blackmailed. He wasn’t an agent for foreign intelligence.
In fact, the direct intervention of foreign powers isn’t the cause of most leaks, and foreign spies aren’t where the information ends up. More often than not, the first place a leaked secret heads is the Internet.
∗When used as a legal defense by members of the intelligence community, this is known as graymail.
∗Contrary to popular usage, an agent of the CIA is more or less equivalent to an informant to the FBI. Along the same lines, the people we think of when we think of the CIA are called case officers. At the FBI, they’re called special agents.
Notes
1. Gabriel Schoenfeld, Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law (New York: Norton, 2010), 109.
2. Ibid.
3. Herbert O. Yardley, The American Black Chamber (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1931), 20.
4. Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping (New York: Random House, 2006), 10.
5. Michael Smith, MI6: The Real James Bonds 1909–1939 (London: Dialogue, 2011).
6. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 15–16.
7. Matthew M. Aid, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 26–27.
8. Ibid., 33.
9. National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 9, “Communications Intelligence,” December 29, 1952.
10. T. M. Hannah, “The Many Lives of Herbert O. Yardley,” Cryptologic Spectrum (Fort George G. Meade, Maryland: National Security Agency, 1981), 26.
11. Todd S. Purdum, “Clinton Ends Ban on Security Clearance for Gay Workers,” New York Times, August 5, 1995.
12. James Risen, “CIA to Issue Guidelines on Hiring Foreign Agents,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 1995.
13. John Deutch and Jeffrey Smith, “Smarter Intelligence,” Foreign Policy, February 2002.
14. Douglas Jehl, “Abundance of Caution and Years of Budget Cuts Are Seen to Limit C.I.A.,” New York Times, May 11, 2004.
15. Dana Priest and William Arkin, “A Hidden World, Growing beyond Control,” Washington Post, July 19, 2010.
16. Government Accountability Office, “Personnel Security Clearances,” May 19, 2009, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-09-488.
17. Ibid.
CHAPTER 2
The Curious Case of Primoris Era
On Twitter, entire identities are forged with a single photograph, a biography of 160 characters, and witty banter. The press is especially drawn to the site because of its immediacy, and because it removes the barrier between the reporter and the reader. On Twitter, journalists and sources meet and mingle. Subject matter experts exchange thoughts on the news of the day, and because 854,000 people hold Top Secret clearances, when pressing events concerning national security strike, discretion often gives way to a certain James T. Kirk information swagger. Very few worked their charm, intellect, and access better than the mysterious Shawn Gorman, who wrote under the pseudonym Primoris Era.
She was a bombshell among missile defense experts, and over the course of two years she constructed an enviable personal narrative as an analyst for the Missile Defense Agency moonlighting for the Central Intelligence Agency. She punctuated pithy and insightful commentary on global events with tantalizing photographs revealing more than a little ankle. When the kind of men who fasten their top button scoffed, she ridiculed them and raised the stakes with shots in swimwear. The self-described “First Lady of Missiles” flirted shamelessly and had the kind of body that inspired few complaints.
In espionage, a “honeypot” is a spy who uses his or her sexual appeal to lower the defenses of otherwise guarded secret keepers. If ever Twitter spawned a successful honeypot, she would probably look a lot like Primoris Era.
It’s a certainty that a Twitter honeypot is recruiting online right now. His or her methods are as ancient as espionage itself, but on a scale impossible before social media. This is but one danger of many in a sprawling secrecy apparatus. Too many secrets require too many secret keepers—human beings with the human need for connection. And those connections can be exploited.
Question 5 on the Questionnaire for National Security Positions (SF-86) is, “Have you used any other names?” and specifies, “If ‘Yes,’ give other names used and the period of time you used them [for example: your maiden name, name(s) by a former marriage, former name(s), alias(es), or nickname(s)]. If the other name is your maiden name, put ‘maiden’ in front of it.”1
But what does that mean in the realm of social media? If the purpose of the SF-86 is to disqualify unsuitable candidates from handling classified material, and the purpose of requesting aliases is to conduct a more rigorous screening, does it not stand to reason that online identities are just as much—and in some cases, even more—important than a maiden name? This is not so much to find a clearance petitioner’s photographs in swimwear or less (though clearly blackmail material is abundant on such sites as Facebook), but also to cross-reference the candidate’s online associations with known honeypots and persons of interest.
The question then becomes how deeply the government might delve into a candidate’s parallel virtual life. There are thousands of online communities, e-mail lists, and social networks. Is membership in a World of Warcraft guild worthy of scrutiny, and why not? Should “Threr, Night Elf Mage of Drenden” be considered an alias? And how would the Defense Security Service, which processes security clearances, investigate such identities? How much burden should be placed on industry to ready their membership database, and how would such an interface for federal investigative cross-referencing spill over into law enforcement and domestic surveillance?
The more people in on secrets of national import, the more likely it is that such information leaks to the press, and then to the public. By means of social networking, the press is a middleman that can even be bypassed. As we have seen, on the Internet the difference between Top Secret and public domain is Edit/Copy, Edit/Paste. And once it’s on the Internet, it’s on the Internet forever.
To a young policy analyst for the Department of Defense—her first name is Robin—writing under the Twitter handle @FrostinaDC, Primoris Era’s online life seemed a little too perfect. (Frostina’s name is withheld a
t her request.) She worked for Michael Vickers, the chief special operations civilian at the Pentagon. She accused Primoris Era on Twitter of having a “fake persona” and set off a chain reaction of public correspondence that allegedly culminated with Primoris Era threatening Frostina’s career and, obliquely, her life.
If the allegations had been true, they would have made Primoris Era—man, woman, or foreign intelligence agency—Twitter’s first confirmed honeypot, and marked a new age in clandestine social engineering. A lot of men in the national security field who interacted with Primoris Era lost a lot of sleep over what they might have revealed through Twitter, instant messaging, e-mail, and Facebook. If they were in fact tricked, with their defenses let down they might have passed along very sensitive information on the state’s most highly guarded secrets.
When the accusation was made, the press and the intelligence community began “crowdsourcing,” or working collectively, to determine the nature of the perceived threat. Spencer Ackerman of Wired wrote, “Sometimes Shawna Elizabeth Gorman is Shawna Elizabeth Gorman. Sometimes she’s Shawna Gorman. Sometimes she’s Shawna Felchner. Sometimes she’s Primoris Era. Sometimes she’s Shawna1814. Sometimes she’s Lady Caesar.”2 Naadir Jeewa, a student at Birkbeck College in London, added to the list a few other usernames with brow-raising similarities: VeritableSaint, Shad0wSpear, and ArchAngel_6.3 (VeritableSaint was actually a different person—a U.S. Navy sailor.)4
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