-Caveat Lector-
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/29/reviews/010429.29findert.html
April 29, 2001
BOOKS
BUGGING THE WORLD
An investigative reporter traces the history
of America's most secretive spy agency.
By JOSEPH FINDER
Early in 1964 the United States Embassy in Moscow discovered to its
horror that it was infested with Soviet bugs. For a dozen years or so the
Kremlin had been able to eavesdrop on every conversation and to learn
about every top-secret cable sent between Moscow and Washington.
Stunned, the State Department ordered a full damage assessment. Its
findings, contained in a document declassified just this year, were even
more astonishing: this grave compromise, the worst intelligence breach in
the entire cold war, hadn't made any difference. Not only had it not
altered Soviet behavior to our detriment, but it might even have
accomplished something positive by reassuring the Soviets that we really
weren't planning to attack them.
Here we are almost four decades later, the cold war over 10 years ago,
and you'd think such spy business would have gone the way of the fallout
shelter and Ipana toothpaste. Yet our two gravest diplomatic crises of
the last year were both precipitated by matters of espionage. When the
veteran F.B.I. agent Robert Hanssen was arrested in February and charged
with spying for Russia, the circumstances seemed jarringly anachronistic:
dead drops of top-secret documents under a wooden footbridge in a park,
white tape marks on signs, payments made in cash and diamonds --
everything, it appeared, but spools of microfilm concealed in hollowed-
out pumpkins. But there was nothing dated about the secrets Hanssen is
accused of selling to the Russians, which concerned the newest and most
sophisticated methods of technical surveillance developed by the National
Security Agency. And the Navy EP-3E Aries II spy plane that collided with
a Chinese fighter jet near Hainan island a few weeks ago was, it turns
out, engaged in electronic surveillance on behalf of the same National
Security Agency.
The mysterious organization that connects these two incidents is the
largest, best-financed and arguably most important spy agency in the
world -- and the least known. Created in 1952 in a top-secret presidential
order issued by Harry Truman, the N.S.A. (its very existence so highly
classified that Washington insiders long quipped that its initials stood
for ''No Such Agency'' or ''Never Say Anything'') was cloaked in secrecy
until the 1982 publication of James Bamford's landmark account, ''The
Puzzle Palace.'' His book, by far the most comprehensive and authoritative
account of the agency, quickly became a classic.
Now Bamford, an investigative journalist and a former producer with ABC
News, brings us ''Body of Secrets,'' an examination of the National
Security Agency from its founding to the present. And he has done it
again. Far more than an update of his first book, ''Body of Secrets'' is
every bit as impressive an achievement. Not only is this the definitive
book on America's most secret agency, but it is also an extraordinary
work of investigative journalism, a galvanizing narrative brimming with
heretofore undisclosed details.
The N.S.A. is the Vatican of what the spy trade calls Sigint (for signals
intelligence), information obtained from intercepting, and often
decrypting, voice or electronic communications. It has, accordingly, long
been disdainful of the C.I.A., its rival in the intelligence community,
for its reliance on old-fashioned cloak-and-dagger, spy-versus-spy
techniques, including human intelligence, or Humint. (''The C.I.A. is good
at stealing a memo off a prime minister's desk,'' scoffed one former
N.S.A. director, ''but they're not much good at anything else.'')
Sigint tends to be much more highly esteemed than Humint among our spy-
watchers. Some of America's greatest wartime victories were the result of
signals intelligence. By breaking Japan's ciphers during World War II,
the United States was able to learn in advance of Japan's plans to invade
Midway Island -- and thus to inflict heavy losses on the Japanese Navy and
shorten the war. Britain's success in cracking Germany's Enigma cipher
machine enabled the Allies to detect the location of German U-boats and
thus achieve a victory in the Battle of the Atlantic.
But once the war ended and Washington turned its attention to the Soviet
Union, it found that all the Kremlin's cipher systems were unreadable. The
Sigint war suddenly became more important than ever. Throughout the
1950's, in a highly risky series of sorties, the N.S.A. sent
reconnaissance bombers and other spy aircraft into Soviet airspace to
record radar signals and ferret out holes in the Soviet Union's air
defenses. The Soviets did not hesitate to shoot the planes out of the sky;
some 200 Americans lost their lives.
When the Soviets shot down an American U-2 reconnaissance plane in 1960,
Bamford has found, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was so determined to
conceal his role in the fiasco -- he had actually micromanaged the program
from the Oval Office'' -- that he explicitly ordered his cabinet officers
to lie under oath to Congress about his involvement. This was a clear case
of suborning perjury that, had it been discovered, might well have led to
Eisenhower's impeachment.
Intelligence, of course, is only as good as the uses to which it is put,
and politics often trumps facts. During the war in Vietnam, the N.S.A.'s
careful estimates, which indicated that the number of enemy troops was far
greater than the Defense Department wanted to admit, were much more
accurate than those of any other American intelligence agency. Yet the
Pentagon -- in particular, Gen. William C. Westmoreland's command in
Vietnam -- was bent on convincing both high-level policy makers in
Washington and the American public that the war was eminently winnable. So
it chose to ignore the N.S.A.'s data.
Where ''Body of Secrets'' is weakest, I think, is in its account of the
most horrific incident in the N.S.A.'s history, the assault on the spy
ship Liberty a few miles off the Sinai peninsula during the 1967 Middle
East war. On orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the N.S.A. had sent
the Liberty into the war zone to collect intelligence on the presence of
Soviet troops and weapons in Egypt. On the afternoon of June 8, 1967, the
Liberty was attacked by Israeli forces; 34 Americans were killed, 171
wounded. Was it, as Israel maintained, a ''tragic accident''? Or was it,
as conspiracy theorists and some of the ship's survivors insist, a
coldblooded and deliberate action by the Israelis in order to eliminate
evidence of damaging information the Liberty had intercepted?
Rather too credulously, Bamford sides with the conspiracy theorists. He
argues that the Israelis were attempting to cover up a gruesome mass
murder by Israeli soldiers of some 400 Egyptian P.O.W.'s at the Sinai
town of El Arish. Israel, Bamford claims, acted because it was convinced
that the N.S.A. ship was recording intelligence on this massacre.
''Israeli soldiers were butchering civilians and bound prisoners by the
hundreds,'' he writes, ''a fact that the entire Israeli Army leadership
knew about and condoned.'' He charges, too, that the White House and
Congress ''covered up'' the facts of the attack. But is it really possible
that such an explosive secret could have been kept under wraps for so long
by the Johnson administration, the United States Congress and all of the
famously fractious Israeli Army leadership?
And what serious evidence is there that a massacre of 400 Egyptians really
took place? Bamford's own proof seems rather slender. He cites, for
instance, the eyewitness testimony of an Israeli journalist, Gabi Bron.
Bamford writes: ''Bron saw about 150 Egyptian P.O.W.'s sitting on the
ground, crowded together with their hands held at the backs of their
necks. 'The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then
army police shot them to death,' Bron said.'' The implication here is that
150 Egyptians were slaughtered. Yet the journalist's full account actually
states, ''I saw five prisoners killed this way'' -- a brutal war crime if
true, yes, but of quite a different magnitude.
It hardly seems plausible that Israel would deliberately attack an
American ship, killing dozens of American sailors, risking a confrontation
with a superpower and its only ally -- in short, perpetrating one massacre
in order to cover up another. Perhaps Bamford's analysis has been skewed
by his palpable distaste for the Israeli state: ''Throughout its history,
Israel has hidden its abominable human rights record behind pious
religious claims,'' he writes. ''Critics are regularly silenced with
outrageous charges of anti-Semitism.'' And: ''No one in the weak-kneed
House and Senate wanted to offend powerful pro-Israel groups and lose
their fat campaign contributions.''
By the end of the Vietnam War, the N.S.A.'s staff had exploded to 95,000,
five times that of the C.I.A. It had its own army, navy and air force,
listening posts around the world, a fleet of satellites in space and
seemingly unlimited financing. Yet its darkest, most closely held secret,
Bamford reports, was that for decades, since the agency's birth, it had
been unable to crack a single major Soviet cipher. Not until 1979 was the
N.S.A. finally able to decrypt Russian voice communications and eavesdrop
on the conversations of Soviet leaders talking in their limousines.
The N.S.A. had no such difficulty keeping Americans under surveillance,
a blatant violation of its charter. From its earliest days it had been
illegally spying on United States citizens, Bamford notes, monitoring all
telegrams sent to and from the United States under the auspices of a
program code-named Shamrock. In 1967, the N.S.A. began watching numerous
Americans (including such dire threats to national security as Joan Baez
and Jane Fonda). Although such domestic surveillance has been terminated,
Bamford writes, the N.S.A. is now engaged in a huge global eavesdropping
operation, linking a network of spy satellites from the United States,
Britain and New Zealand through a software package called Echelon. This
program attempts to filter all of the world's signals traffic using lists
of names and key words, in order to identify terrorist threats, illegal
arms deals, narcotics trafficking and the like. Unsurprisingly, Echelon
has given rise to all sorts of paranoid fantasies, convincing people
around the world that their every phone conversation, fax or e-mail
message is being monitored by an all-powerful spy agency in the sky.
Bamford, no apologist for the N.S.A., believes this isn't so. He details
the many hoops through which the agency must jump to get permission to
pursue an American citizen, a process that leaves a wide array of
bureaucratic trails.
Moreover, even if the N.S.A. had the resources, and the desire, to listen
in on everyone's phone conversations and to read everyone's e-mail, it is
rapidly losing the ability to do so. This is the N.S.A.'s final dirty
little secret: the explosion of digital communications, powerful
encryption software and buried fiber-optic cable has made the agency's job
nearly impossible. Military communications no longer bounce off microwave
towers and spill into the ether, ripe for the picking, but instead zip
along the filaments of fiber-optic cables. Drug traffickers now use
encrypted digital cell phones. When India stunned the world by carrying
out nuclear tests in May 1998 in defiance of a longstanding moratorium,
the N.S.A. (and thus Washington) was caught unawares, one of the most
remarkable intelligence failures of the past decades. The reason: India's
defense establishment had begun using digital encryption that defeated the
N.S.A.'s attempts to listen in. As more than one N.S.A. critic has pointed
out, technology, once the N.S.A.'s friend, has now become its enemy.
So the agency has begun to rely more and more on a covert N.S.A./C.I.A.
unit called the Special Collection Service, which specializes in black-bag
jobs, planting bugs in computer networks, bribing code clerks. It's the
ultimate irony that the agency, which was founded on the premise that the
age of the human spy was over, and which never attempted to hide its
contempt for the C.I.A., must now turn for its salvation to the good old-
fashioned cloak and dagger.
-------
Joseph Finder writes frequently about intelligence. His most recent novel
is "High Crimes."
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