Code Warriors

by Stephen Budiansky

  Operator 1: Did you know that I’ve…we have to learn Russian.

  Operator 2: Who?

  Operator 1: Everybody here.

  Operator 2: Everybody?

  Operator 1: Yes.47

  Concerned for some time over a lack of coverage of sub-Saharan Africa and South America and the growing political difficulties in establishing American intercept bases in those regions, NSA had asked the Naval Security Group to study the idea of having a dedicated naval vessel do the job. In 1960 the Navy began building the first of its “Technical Research Ships”: the USS Oxford, a World War II Liberty ship taken out of mothballs and equipped with two dozen radio intercept positions and a bristling array of antennas. Two smaller, equally overage transport vessels were leased by NSA from the Military Sea Transportation Service and hastily converted to seaborne listening posts as well. On its shakedown cruise in September 1961 the Oxford was able to intercept both military and commercial microwave telephone communications from Cuba with considerable success as it slowly trolled along the coast just outside the twelve-mile international limit.48

  Throughout the first half of 1962, monitoring of plain-language communications from Russian merchant vessels had tracked a surge of mysterious shipments to Cuba. On May 1, a U.S. ferret aircraft flying near the westernmost tip of the island collected signals identified as coming from a Soviet Scan Odd radar, carried on MiG-17 and MiG-19 jet fighters and used for airborne interception. On July 24, NSA reported “an unusual number of Soviet passenger ships” en route to Cuba, carrying as many as 3,335 Russians.49

  The crisis began in earnest on August 29, when a U-2 flying over the island returned with photographs showing the construction of eight SA-2 missile sites. The SA-2 was the antiaircraft missile that had shot down the U-2 over Sverdlovsk in 1960: it was the most advanced surface-to-air missile in the Soviet military, and it was expensive. Soviet officials had repeatedly insisted that none of the weapons it was sending to Cuba were offensive. But CIA director John McCone—at this point virtually a minority of one among the president’s advisers—concluded that the only logical purpose of the SA-2s was to defend something of exceptional importance, and the only thing he could think of that fit that bill was launch sites for ballistic missiles that could strike the United States. On September 19, NSA detected signals from a radar known as Spoon Rest that was part of the SA-2 system, indicating that the air defense sites were operational. Then, on October 15, a U-2 overflight photographed unmistakable evidence of SS-4 ballistic missile sites under construction.50

  In the frantic fourteen days that followed, NSA moved one hundred analysts and linguists from A Group to Moody’s area in B1. A makeshift command post was set up across the hall from the A Group front office. Admiral Frost’s successor as NSA director, Air Force lieutenant general Gordon A. Blake, had been in the job only three months but had already shown himself to be a master of tact both in dealing with the civilian staff and in handling the agency’s external relations around official Washington. Juanita Moody remembered the director dropping by at one point in the midst of the crisis to ask if there was anything he could do to help; Moody replied that she could use some additional staff to deal with a sudden problem that had arisen. The next thing she heard was the three-star general speaking on a phone at a nearby desk: “This is Gordon Blake calling for Mrs. Moody. Could you come in to work now?”51

  Fearing that public disclosure of the existence of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba would force his hand by creating a domestic political furor, leave the Soviets no diplomatic option to back down, and jeopardize any hopes for a peaceful resolution, Kennedy tried to cut off all access to intelligence on the matter within the government; McCone countered that withholding evidence—Kennedy was even insisting that top intelligence officials be kept in the dark—was “extremely dangerous,” but finally settled on an arrangement in which distribution would be strictly limited. Only members of the U.S. Intelligence Board and “their personal offices” were cleared to receive the material, code-named Funnel. That included the NSA director, but it cut off all the normal flows of information through the U.S. intelligence community: even Moody was not cleared.52

  NSA’s crucial reporting came from ELINT, plain-language intercepts, and traffic analysis. On Monday, October 22, Kennedy announced in a televised address the presence of the Soviet missile sites and his imposition of a naval “quarantine” of Cuba: the word was chosen to sidestep the fact that a blockade by any name was an act of war.

  Early the following morning NSA intercepted a series of HF Morse code signals from the main radio station of the Soviet merchant marine, located in the Black Sea port of Odessa, to each of the twenty-two Soviet vessels en route to Cuba, ordering them to stand by for an extremely urgent cipher message. An hour later the coded message, with a preamble marking it as the highest priority, came through. Its contents were unreadable by the U.S. analysts. But by noon, direction-finding fixes on the Soviet freighters began to show that some had stopped dead in the water, while others had actually turned around and were heading back. It was the first hint that the Soviets might be prepared to back down.53

  The report went to the director of naval intelligence, one of the select few cleared to receive Funnel material; he in turn informed the CIA that evening only that he had “unconfirmed” information about the Soviet ship movements. It was not until noon the next day, after ONI had corroborated the reports with visual reconnaissance, that the Navy passed to McNamara and the White House the fact that all of the twenty-two merchant ships had either halted or turned back. McNamara blew a gasket, demanding to know how ONI could have sat on such important information for more than twelve hours in the midst of a crisis.54

  On Friday, October 26, with the largest assemblage of U.S. military forces since the Korean War gathering in Florida, the Caribbean, and the southeastern United States in preparation for airstrikes by 579 combat aircraft followed by an invasion of the island by forty thousand marines and one hundred thousand Army troops including two airborne divisions, Khrushchev dictated a long, rambling, emotional letter to the White House seeming to propose a deal to remove the missiles if the United States promised not to invade Cuba. The next day, as an encouraging reply was being drafted at the White House, Radio Moscow broadcast a second Khrushchev letter, attaching new and unacceptable demands, including the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey. An American U-2 was shot down over Cuba later that day, the pilot killed.

  Returning to the Pentagon that evening, McNamara looked up at the sky and wondered aloud to an aide how many more sunsets he might see.55

  The breakthrough came late that night, when the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, held a long meeting with the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, at the Department of Justice in which he warned that time was running out. It was not an “ultimatum,” Kennedy carefully said, but the U-2 flights were going to continue and the next time one was shot at, U.S. forces would answer by striking the SA-2 site that had fired on it, and the result would be an uncontrollable escalation that could lead to a nuclear war neither of them wanted: if the only issue was Turkey, that could be dealt with quietly. (In fact the United States had decided months earlier to withdraw its missiles from Turkey, a move delayed only because the Turks objected that it would be seen as undermining U.S. support for their country.)

  The next day, Sunday, October 28, Khrushchev ended the crisis with a letter to President Kennedy read over Radio Moscow declaring his intention to accept the American terms, without mentioning the behind-the-scenes understanding on Turkey, and stating that the Soviet government had issued “a new order to dismantle the arms which you described as offensive, and crate and return them to the USSR.”56

  NSA made an important contribution to the management of the greatest crisis of the Cold War, but signally failed to offer either advance warning of Soviet intentions or evidence of the arrival of the SS-4 missiles that were the crux of the entire matter. The only tangential
indicator that signals intelligence provided came from monitoring plaintext telegrams sent by Soviet military officers to their wives and families back home telling them of their safe arrival in Cuba—“love and kisses messages,” NSA analysts called them—and the discovery that a number of the officers were known to be associated with the Soviet rocket forces. In the assessment of NSA’s declassified history of the period, the Cuban Missile Crisis “marked the most significant failure of SIGINT to warn national leaders” since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.57 The inability to decipher any of the high-level cryptographic systems of the Soviet government or military was continuing to take its toll.

  —

  Just as in the Hungary and Suez crises of 1956, the Cuban crisis of 1962 jammed and overloaded NSA’s global communications systems. In the aftermath of the earlier crises, NSA had pressed a plan for a new communications network called Criticomm that would directly link two hundred NSA field sites to a central hub at Fort Meade; the aim was to be able to notify the president and National Security Council of any critical signals intelligence information—such reports would be labeled with the designator “Critic”—within ten minutes of interception. Louis Tordella, only a few days into his job as NSA deputy director, was summoned to the White House in August 1958 to brief the president, who approved it on the spot.

  The heart of the system would be a new hundred-word-per-minute online encryption system that NSA had developed for use aboard Navy ships and at Army and Air Force tactical field stations. The KW-26, mounted in a six-foot-high equipment rack, used vacuum-tube shift registers in place of wired rotors, and NSA already had an order out for the first fifteen hundred units. But Criticomm would never have more than a limited capacity to handle only the most urgent messages. The overwhelming majority of intercepts still arrived either after hours of travel through a series of manual teleprinter relay stations or on the tens of thousands of reels of magnetic tapes sent to Fort Meade each month by air, or even by ship. A seemingly endless jurisdictional battle with other Defense Department agencies delayed plans for a more comprehensive overhaul of the communications network. More than one abortive attempt to develop a so-called automatic switch that could eliminate the mountains of paper tape that had to be printed out and repunched at each relay point compounded the bureaucratic gridlock with a series of embarrassing technical missteps.58

  Following the Cuban crisis, things finally began to move. The mechanical demodulators with rotating distributors and printers that were still being used to separate out intercepted teleprinter traffic at field sites—their design was literally unchanged from the 1940s devices that had been copied from captured German gear at the end of World War II—at last began to be replaced with digital equipment that recorded the signals directly onto magnetic tape, with the first test models arriving at field sites in January 1963. Manual Morse traffic, which was still being transcribed by operators on typewriters, the copy then retyped on teleprinter machines for transmittal, was semiautomated with new terminals that could directly punch special eight-bit paper tape for transmission over a dedicated NSA communications network called Strawhat; the eight-bit format included special symbols that flagged header information such as call signs and times of transmission for automatic sorting and filing. By the mid-1960s NSA was developing a system using a Honeywell 316 computer at each field site that would accept manual Morse data from up to 128 operator terminals, format it directly onto magnetic tape for storage, then transmit the accumulated messages every six hours over a dedicated data link to Fort Meade. There, other computers repacked the data and passed it on to a large mainframe such as an IBM 360.

  By the end of the decade, NSA’s efforts to digitize data transmission and handling had led directly to the development of technologies that would make their way with revolutionary consequences into the commercial computer world in the ensuing two decades, among them optical character readers, 2400-and then 9600-baud data links, an embryonic system of e-mail to allow analysts to exchange messages, and the sharing of data from a central server to individual workstations to create an all-electronic “paperless environment,” allowing analysts to call up intercepts, reports, and databases on a screen without the need for cumbersome printouts.59

  The Cuban crisis also dealt a final blow to the last remnants of NSA’s nine-to-five work culture. The events had hit home the reality that it no longer demanded a particular military or diplomatic confrontation to generate a crisis: a world with two nuclear-armed superpowers possessed of ICBMs and long-range bombers was by definition on the brink of nuclear war all the time, a state of constant crisis that demanded keeping an around-the-clock watch. General Blake had set up a makeshift command post at NSA during the Cuban crisis, but afterward ordered the creation of a permanent command center, which in 1969 evolved into the Current SIGINT Operations Center and then in 1973 the National SIGINT Operations Center, or NSOC (pronounced EN-sock), a mission control–like facility with maps, big screens, colored telephones, and secure voice links to CIA, the White House, and other key Washington offices. The NSA command center maintained a twenty-four-hour-a-day watch to monitor incoming reports and could communicate directly to field sites over a teleprinter network called Opscomm, to order alerts or quickly shift the focus of their monitoring in response to developing events. The Criticomm system was reserved for formal reporting of urgent Critic messages, but by 1964 a system was devised for sending “tip-offs” to alert the operations center of Soviet activities that bore closer watching, such as movements of Soviet nuclear-capable Tu-16 jet bombers in Eastern Europe; a field site could fire off over Opscomm a short formatted report known as a Bullmoose (plural: Bullmeese) that would arrive in a matter of minutes at Fort Meade and the U.S. Air Force’s center at Zweibrücken, Germany, and from there automatically be repeated over the teleprinter network to all of the other NSA field sites monitoring Soviet air activity west of the Urals.

  “All of us felt we were on the parapets watching for the start of World War III,” recalled one NSA official from that era. The transformation of NSA from an academic “Sleepy Hollow,” in the words of the agency’s internal history, to a sentry post on the front lines of the Cold War was complete; more than 80 percent of the total “intelligence product” of the entire U.S. government was by the mid-1960s coming from SIGINT.60

  But there was still a bottleneck when it came to NSA talking to the White House. Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, shared McNamara’s exasperation over the delay in receiving timely signals intelligence reports during the Cuban crisis, and wanted NSA to have a direct feed to the White House Situation Room from now on. CIA, however, ran the Sit Room—and lodged the familiar protest that NSA had no charter to perform intelligence analysis, or even send its results directly to the White House; that was the job of CIA, State, and the military intelligence offices. (In preparing NSA’s products for wider distribution, CIA also rigorously enforced the security rule that anything that identified it as coming from intercepted communications had to be stripped off, which not only overstated the role of its agents but often added a spy-novel absurdity. Admiral Bobby Inman, who would serve as NSA’s director in the late 1970s, would forever remember one CIA-sanitized COMINT report he read that attributed the source to “an elderly Tibetan horsekeeper.”) During the Cuban crisis NSA had already overstepped the letter of its supposed charter by issuing six-hourly wrap-ups, and then continued afterward to issue a daily “SIGINT Summary” (nicknamed the Green Hornet for the color of its cover wrapper), to the extreme irritation of CIA and the military intelligence agencies, but with the approbation of the White House—which Deputy Director Tordella and other top NSA officials rightly concluded was more important as far as the political fortunes of their agency were concerned. By the start of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, NSA had a permanent liaison in the White House and a direct circuit running from Fort Meade, not to mention a soaring reputation as the one unfailingly reliable source of intelligence
that an increasingly secretive and embattled president was willing to trust.61

  9

  Reinventing the Wheel

  Lyndon Johnson was fascinated by signals intelligence. Like no world leader since Winston Churchill, Johnson constantly demanded to see the actual translations of individual intercepted messages. Like Churchill, too, who shortly after becoming prime minister in 1940 ordered that “all the Enigma messages” be sent to him daily, not imagining how many there could be or how meaningless most of them were without interpretation and context, Johnson told NSA officials that he wanted to be called personally whenever a Critic message came in. Given the number of Critics triggered by routine movements of Soviet bombers over the Arctic, NSA took it upon itself to quietly ignore the request. But Tordella made sure that his agency’s most important customer was kept well supplied with its best products. Johnson, the politician par excellence, especially wanted to see any intercepts in which foreign officials or leaders mentioned or quoted him by name, and Tordella was too good a politician himself not to seize such an opportunity. He established a special courier service from Fort Meade to place this especially sensitive material directly in the president’s hands. To handle the regular supply of other raw signals intelligence coming into the White House, NSA now had a permanent representative stationed in the Situation Room to brief White House staff and try to add at least some of the context still almost completely absent from NSA’s reports and translations.1

  Like Harry Truman—another self-made man who assumed the presidency upon the death of an immensely popular, eastern establishment, Harvard-educated predecessor—the Texas-born Johnson had an inexhaustible energy for studying documents and absorbing facts. He once confided to Hugh Sidey of Time magazine, “I don’t believe that I’ll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful it is, because I didn’t go to Harvard.” Keenly aware of the contempt of intellectuals for his folksy political persona, his unsophisticated upbringing, and his Machiavellian mastery of the Washington insider game, LBJ compensated by seemingly trying to know everything, and through sheer force of formidable natural intelligence often succeeded.2 The appeal of NSA’s reports was irresistible to a man of Johnson’s sharp mind and sharper political instincts: signals intelligence promised an unfiltered source of information that gave him the ultimate insider’s advantage over both enemies abroad and political rivals at home.