Dark Territory

by Fred Kaplan

  To keep NSA at the center of this universe, Minihan created a new office, at Fort Meade, called the IOTC—the Information Operations Technology Center. The idea was to consolidate all of the military’s sundry cyber shops: not to destroy them—he didn’t want to set off bureaucratic wars—but to corral them into his domain.

  He had neither the legal authority nor the political clout to do this by fiat, so he asked Art Money, whom he’d known for years and who’d just become ASD(C3I), to scour the individual services’ cyber budgets for duplicative programs; no surprise, Money found many. He took his findings to John Hamre, highlighted the redundancies, and made the pitch. No agency, Money said, could perform these tasks better than the NSA—which, he added, happened to have an office called the IOTC, which would be ideal for streamlining and coordinating these far-flung efforts. Hamre, who had recently come to appreciate the NSA’s value, approved the idea and put the new center under Money’s supervision.

  When Hayden took over NSA, Money pressed him to take the center in a different direction. Minihan’s aim, in setting up the IOTC, was to emphasize the T—Technology: that was the NSA’s chief selling point, its rationale for remaining at the top of the pyramid. Money wanted to stress the O—Operations: he wanted to use the IOTC as a back door for the NSA to get into cyber offensive operations.

  The idea aroused controversy on a number of fronts. First, within the NSA, many of the old-timers didn’t like it. The point of SIGINT, the prime NSA mission, was to gather intelligence by penetrating enemy communications; if the NSA attacked the source of those communications, then the intelligence would be blown; the enemy would know that we knew how to penetrate his network, and he’d change his codes, revamp his security.

  Second, Money’s idea wasn’t quite legal. Broadly, the military operated under Title 10 of the federal statutes, while the intelligence agencies, including the NSA, fell under Title 50. Title 10 authorized the use of force; Title 50 did not. The military could use intelligence gathered by Title 50 agencies as the basis for an attack; the NSA could not launch attacks on its own.

  Money and Hayden thought a case could be made that the IOTC maneuvered around these strictures because, formally, it reported to the secretary of defense. But the legal thicket was too dense for such a simple workaround. Each of the military services would have a stake in any action that the IOTC might take, as would the CIA and possibly other agencies. It was a ramshackle structure from the start. It made sense from a purely technical point of view: as Minihan and Hayden both realized, from their tenures at the Air Force Information Warfare Center in San Antonio, computer network offense and defense were operationally the same—but the legal authorities were separate.

  Hayden considered the IOTC a good enough arrangement for the moment. At least, as Minihan had intended, it protected the NSA’s dominance in the cyber arena. Expanding its realm over the long haul would have to wait. Meanwhile, Hayden faced a slew of other, daunting problems from almost the moment he took office.

  Soon after his arrival at Fort Meade, he got wind of a top secret report, written a few months earlier for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, titled “Are We Going Deaf?” It concluded that the NSA, once on the cutting edge of SIGINT technology, had failed to keep pace with the changes in global telecommunications; that, while the world was shifting to digital cell phones, encrypted email, and fiber optics, Fort Meade remained all too wedded to tapping land lines, analog circuits, and intercepting radio frequency transmissions.

  The report was written by the Technical Advisory Group, a small panel of experts that the Senate committee had put together in 1997 to analyze the implications of the looming digital age. Most of the group’s members were retired NSA officials, who had urged their contacts on the committee to create the advisory group precisely because they were disturbed by Fort Meade’s recalcitrant ways and thought that outside prodding—especially from the senators who held its purse strings—might push things forward.

  One of the group’s members, and the chief (though unnamed) author of this report, was former NSA director Bill Studeman. A full decade had passed since Studeman, upon arriving at Fort Meade, commissioned two major studies: one, projecting how quickly the world would shift from analog to digital; the other, concluding that the skill sets of NSA personnel were out of whack with the requirements of the impending new world.

  In the years since, Studeman had served as deputy director of the CIA, joined various intelligence advisory boards, and headed up projects on surveillance and information warfare as vice president of Northrop Grumman Corporation. In short, he was still plugged in, and he was appalled by the extent to which the NSA was broaching obsolescence.

  The Senate committee took his report very seriously, citing it in its annual report and threatening to slash the NSA budget if the agency didn’t bring its practices up to date.

  Studeman’s report was circulated while Minihan was still NSA director, and it irritated him. He’d instigated a lot of reforms already; the agency had come a long way since the Senate committee discovered that it was spending only $2 million a year on projects to penetrate the Internet. But he didn’t speak out against the report: if the senators believed it, maybe they’d boost the NSA’s budget. That was his biggest problem: he knew what needed to be done; he just needed more money to do it.

  But Hayden, when he took over Fort Meade, took Studeman’s report as gospel and named a five-man group of outsiders—senior executives at aerospace contractors who’d managed several intelligence-related projects—to conduct a review of the NSA’s organization, culture, management, and priorities. With Hayden’s encouragement, they pored over the books and interviewed more than a hundred officials, some inside the NSA, some at other agencies that had dealings—in some cases, contentious dealings—with Fort Meade.

  On October 12, after two months of probing, the executives briefed Hayden on their findings, which they, soon after, summarized in a twenty-seven-page report. The NSA, they wrote, suffered from a “poorly communicated mission,” a “lack of vision,” a “broken personnel system,” “poor” relations with other agencies that depended on its intelligence, and an “inward-looking culture,” stemming in part from its intense secrecy. As a result of all these shortcomings, NSA managers tended to protect its “legacy infrastructure” rather than develop “new methods to deal with the global network.” If it persisted in its outmoded ways, the agency “will fail,” and its “stakeholders”—the president, secretary of defense, and other senior officials—“will go elsewhere” for their intelligence.

  Few of the group’s observations or critiques were new. NSA directors, going back twenty years, had spoken of the looming gap between the agency’s tools and the digital world to come. Studeman and his mentor, Bobby Ray Inman, warned of the need to adapt, though too far ahead of time for their words to gain traction. Mike McConnell prodded the machine into motion, but then got caught up in the ill-fated Clipper Chip. Ken Minihan saw the future more clearly than most, but he wasn’t a natural manager. He was a good old boy from Texas who dispensed with the formalities of most general officers and played up his down-home style (some called it “his Andy Griffith bit”). Everyone liked him, but few understood what he was talking about. He would drop Air Force aphorisms, like “We’re gonna make a hard right turn with our blinkers off,” which flew over everyone’s head. He’d issue stern pronouncements, like “One team, one mission,” but this, too, inspired only uncertainty: he seemed to be saying that someone should work more closely with someone else, but who and with whom—the SIGINT and Information Assurance Directorates? the NSA and the CIA? the intelligence community and the military? No one quite knew.

  Hayden, by contrast, was a modern military general, less brash, certainly less folksy, than Minihan: more of a tight-cornered, chart-sketching manager. As a follow-up to the five-man group’s briefing, he circulated throughout the NSA his own eighteen-page, bluntly worded memo titled “The Director’s Work Plan for Cha
nge,” summarizing much of the executives’ report and outlining his solutions.

  His language was as stark as his message. The NSA, he wrote, “is a misaligned organization,” its storied legacy “in great peril.” It needed bold new leadership, an integrated workforce in which signals intelligence and information security would act in concert, not at odds with each other (this is what Minihan had meant by “one team, one mission”), and—above all—a refocused SIGINT Directorate that would “address the challenge of technological change.”

  He concluded, “We’ve got it backwards. We start with our internal tradecraft, believing that customers will ultimately benefit”—when, in fact, the agency needed to focus first on the needs of the customers (the White House, the Defense Department, and the rest of the intelligence community), then align its tradecraft to those tasks.

  Minihan had gone some distance down that road. He decimated the A Group, the Soviet specialists who’d helped win the Cold War, but he didn’t erect a structure, or clearly define a new mission worthy of the title A Group in its place. It wasn’t entirely his fault: as he frequently complained, he lacked the money, the time, and any direction from his political masters. Ideally, as Hayden would note, the NSA goes out and gets what the nation’s leaders want it to get; but no one high up gave Minihan any marching order. Then again, the lack of communication went both ways: no one high up knew what the NSA could offer, apart from the usual goods, which were fine, as far as they went, but they fell short in a world where its tools and techniques were “going deaf.”

  One of the agency’s main problems, according to the aerospace executives’ report, was a “broken personnel system.” Employees tended to serve for life, and they were promoted through the ranks at the same pace, almost automatically, with little regard for individual talent. This tenured system had obstructed previous stabs at reform: the upper rungs were occupied by people who’d come up in the 1970s and 1980s, when money flowed freely, the enemy was clear-cut, and communications—mainly telephone calls and radio-frequency transmissions—could be tapped by a simple circuit or scooped out of the air.

  Hayden changed the personnel system, first of all. On November 15, he inaugurated “One Hundred Days of Change.” Before, senior employees wore special badges and rode in special elevators; now, everyone would wear the same badges, and all elevators would be open to all. Hayden also scoured personnel evaluations, consulted a few trusted advisers, and—after the first two weeks—fired sixty people who had been soaking up space for decades and promoted sixty more competent officials, most of them far junior in age and seniority, to fill the vacancies.

  Much grumbling ensued, but then, on January 24, 2000, ten weeks into Hayden’s campaign, an alarm bell went off: the NSA’s main computer system crashed—and stayed crashed for seventy-two hours. The computer was still storing intelligence that the field stations were gathering from all over the world, but no one at Fort Meade could gain access to it. Raw intelligence—unsifted, unprocessed, unanalyzed—was all but useless; for three days, the NSA was, in effect, shut down.

  At first, some suspected sabotage or a delayed effect of Y2K. But the in-house tech crews quickly concluded that the computer had simply been overloaded; and the damage was so severe that they’d have to reconstruct the data and programs after it came back online.

  The grumbling about Hayden ceased. If anyone had doubted that big changes were necessary, there was no doubt now.

  Another criticism in the executives’ report was that the SIGINT Directorate stovepiped its data by geography—one group looked at signals from the former Soviet Union, another from the Middle East, another from Asia—whereas, out in the real world, all communications passed through the same network. The World Wide Web was precisely that—worldwide.

  In their report, the executives suggested a new organizational chart for the SIGINT Directorate, broken down not along regional lines (which no longer made sense) but rather into “Global Response,” “Global Network,” and “Tailored Access.”

  “Global Response” would confront day-to-day crises without diverting resources from the agency’s steady tasks. This had been a big source of Minihan’s frustrations: the president or secretary of defense kept requesting so much intelligence on one crisis after another—Saddam Hussein’s arms buildup, North Korea’s nuclear program, prospects for Middle East peace talks—that he couldn’t focus on structural reforms.

  “Global Network” was the new challenge. In the old days, NSA linguists would sit and listen to live feeds, or stored tapes, of phone conversations and radio transmissions that its taps and antenna dishes were scooping up worldwide. In the new age of cell phones, faxes, and the Internet, there often wasn’t anything to listen to; and to the extent there was, the signal didn’t travel from one point to another, on one line or channel. Instead, digital communications zipped through the network in data packets, which were closely interspersed with packets of other communications (a feature that would spark great controversy years later, when citizens learned that the NSA was intercepting their conversations as well as those of bad guys). These networks and packets were far too vast for human beings to monitor in real time; the intelligence would have to be crunched, sifted, and processed by very high-speed computers, scanning the data for key words or suspicious traffic patterns.

  To Hayden, the three-day computer crash in January suggested that the NSA’s own hardware might not be up to the task. The aerospace executives had recommended, with no small self-interest, that the agency should examine what outside contractors might offer. Hayden took them up on their suggestion. New computers and software would be needed to scan and make sense of this new global network; maybe commercial contractors would do a better job of creating them.

  He called the new program Trailblazer, and in August, he held Trailblazer Industry Day, inviting 130 corporate representatives to come to Fort Meade and hear his pitch. In October, he opened competition on a contract to build a “technical demonstration platform” of the new system. The following March, the NSA awarded $280 million—the opening allotment of what would amount to more than $1 billion over the next decade—to Science Applications International Corporation, with pieces of the program shared by Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Computer Sciences Corp., and Booz Allen Hamilton, all of which had longtime relations with the intelligence community.

  SAIC was particularly intertwined with NSA. Bobby Ray Inman sat on its board of directors. Bill Black, one of the agency’s top cryptologists, had retired in 1997 to become the corporation’s assistant vice president; then, three years later, in a case of revolving doors that shocked the most jaded insiders, Hayden brought him back in to be the NSA deputy director—and to manage Trailblazer, which he’d been running from the other side of the transom at SAIC.

  But the NSA needed a bigger breakthrough still: it needed tools and techniques to intercept signals, not only as they flowed through the digital network but also at their source. The biggest information warfare campaign to date, in the Balkans, had involved hacking into Belgrade’s telephone system. Earlier that decade, in the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s generals sent orders through fiber-optic cable, the Pentagon’s Joint Intelligence Committee—which relied heavily on NSA personnel and technology—figured out how to blow up the cable links, forcing Saddam to switch to microwave. The NSA knew how to intercept microwaves, but it didn’t yet know how to intercept the data rushing through fiber optics. That’s what the agency now needed to do.

  In their report to Hayden, the aerospace executives recommended that the SIGINT and Information Assurance Directorates “work very closely,” since their two missions were “rapidly becoming two sides of the same coin.”

  For years, Information Assurance, located in an annex near Baltimore-Washington International Airport, a half hour’s drive from Fort Meade, had been testing and fixing software used by the U.S. military—probing for vulnerabilities that the enemy could exploit. Now one of the main roles of the SIGINT crews, in the
heart of the agency’s headquarters, was to find and exploit vulnerabilities in the adversaries’ software. Since people (and military establishments) around the world were using the same Western software, the Information Assurance specialists possessed knowledge that would be valuable to the SIGINT crews. At the same time, the SIGINT crews had knowledge about adversaries’ networks—what they were doing, what kinds of attacks they were planning and testing—that would be valuable to the Information Assurance specialists. Sharing this knowledge, on the offense and the defense, required mixing the agency’s two distinct cultures.

  Inman and McConnell had taken steps toward this integration. Minihan had started to tear down the wall, moving a few people from the annex to headquarters and vice versa. Hayden now widened Minihan’s wedge, moving more people back and forth, to gain insights about the security of their own operations.

  Another issue that needed to be untangled was the division of labor within the intelligence community, especially between the NSA and the CIA. In the old days, this division was clear: if information moved, the NSA would intercept it; if it stood still, the CIA would send a spy to nab it. NSA intercepted electrons whooshing through the air or over phone lines; CIA stole documents sitting on a desk or in a vault. The line had been sharply drawn for decades. But in the digital age, the line grew fuzzy. Where did computers stand in relation to this line? They stored data on floppy disks and hard drives, which were stationary; but they also sent bits and bytes through cyberspace. Either way, the information was the same, so who should get it: Langley or Fort Meade?

  The logical answer was both. But pulling off that feat would require a fusion with little legal or bureaucratic precedent. The two spy agencies had collaborated on the occasional project over the years, but this would involve an institutional melding of missions and functions. To do its part, each agency would have to create a new entity—or to beef up, and reorient, an existing one.