-Caveat Lector-
NSA Confidential
The ultra-secretive National Security Agency was on the verge
of becoming a Cold War relic. Now it's getting smart
The damaged U.S. spy jet on Hainan Island
By James Bamford
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
May 19 - The CRITIC arrived at the National Security
Operations Center in the early evening. Short for Critical
Intelligence, it is the spy world's highest priority message,
used only to report an event of critical importance to the
nation.
Watch officers in the dimly lit room were stunned. One of
their EP-3E reconnaissance planes-packed bulkhead to bulkhead
with highly secret eavesdropping gear and cipher equipment-was
in deep trouble and preparing to crash land on a military
airfield in China-the very country on which it was spying.
Seconds after the message arrived, notification went out to
the president and other senior officials throughout
Washington.
The emergency landing of the EP-3E on Hainan Island, followed
by the detention of the 24 crewmembers, suddenly focused world
attention on an activity normally kept under a heavy cloak.
The National Security Operation Center-known as NSOC
and pronounced N-sock-sits at the epicenter of America's vast,
worldwide electronic espionage network, a network controlled
by the ultrasecret National Security Agency. The emergency
landing of the EP-3E on Hainan Island, followed by the
detention of the 24 crewmembers, suddenly focused world
attention on an activity normally kept under a heavy cloak.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, NSA is
eavesdropping on the world. But the capture of the spy plane
and its priceless cargo of highly classified equipment and
documents-which may give the Chinese clues to avoid future
eavesdropping-is just the latest blow to an agency some say
may be beginning to go deaf.
SECRET CITY
Twenty-five miles north of the nation's capitol, near
the sleepy Maryland hamlet of Annapolis Junction, a
mysterious, restricted exit ramp leads off from the southbound
lane of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. It quickly
disappears behind tall earthen berms and a wall of trees. What
lies beyond the forest is a strange and secret city, one
surrounded by a labyrinth of barbed wire fences, motion
detectors, hydraulic anti-tank devices, thick cement barriers,
and massive, closely-place boulders. Should a threat be
detected, the "men-in-black"-commandos in black paramilitary
uniforms, special headgear, and brandishing Colt 9mm
submachine guns, mobilize. Telephoto surveillance cameras peer
down from odd-shaped buildings, armed police patrol the
boundaries, and bright yellow signs warn against taking any
photographs or making so much as a note or a simple sketch of
the metropolis, under the penalties of the Internal Security
Act.
For nearly half a century, the NSA has quietly monitored
Russian military commanders barking orders to tank battalions,
tapped into Iraqi diplomatic messages, and snatched faxes
between Iranian defense officials and suspected terrorists.
The secret city is home to the National Security
Agency, the nation's largest and most hidden spy agency. For
nearly half a century, the NSA has quietly monitored Russian
military commanders barking orders to tank battalions, tapped
into Iraqi diplomatic messages, and snatched faxes between
Iranian defense officials and suspected terrorists. Millions
of intercepted conversations per hour flow into the agency's
acres of supercomputers-more numbercrunchers than anywhere
else on earth. Using what is known as "brute force," the
codebreaking machines pound streams of encrypted data with a
quadrillion-1,000,000,000,000,000-possible solutions in the
time it takes to wink. Within NSA's secret city, time is
measured in femtoseconds, one million-billionth of a second.
But on Jan. 24, 2000, a Monday evening, the secret
city suddenly went quiet. NSA's brain, overworked, had a
sudden seizure, a blackout. Its ears continued to hear-pulling
in millions of messages an hour-but its electronic mind could
no longer think. Three miles away in his stately brick home,
NSA Director Michael Hayden, a three-star Air Force General,
had just finished his dinner and was watching television when
his secure STU-3 phone rang. The entire system has crashed, he
was told.
The extraordinary crash of "Black Monday" reinforced
the fears of many that NSA had finally hit the technological
wall. The agency, whose predecessors had played a major role
in ending World War II by breaking both the high level German
and Japanese codes, could no longer cut it. Fiber-optic
cables, with their thin glass strands, were too difficult to
tap; the spread of encryption throughout the world was
outpacing the agency's aging supercomputers; and the switch to
digital communications, with packets of signals going every
which way, had become too complex to intercept. As a result,
the agency completely missed such critical events as the
Indian nuclear test, the terrorist bombing of the embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania, and the attack on the USS Cole. Once NSA
officials would show off their prowess to highly cleared
visitors by playing intercepts of wanted terrorist Osama bin
Laden talking over his satellite phone to his mother. Now NSA
officials claim they can no longer hear him since he switched
to encryption. "We don't know where he is," complained one
senior official.
Former NSA deputy director Barbara McNamara outlined
in stark numbers another of NSA's key problems today-too much
communication. "Forty years ago there were five thousand
stand-alone computers, no fax machines, and not one cellular
phone. . . In 1999 there were over 420 million computers, most
of them networked. There were roughly 14 million fax machines
and 468 million cell phones and those numbers continue to
grow. The telecommunications industry is investing a trillion
dollars to encircle the world in millions of miles of high
bandwidth fiber-optic cable." In addition, the Internet
currently doubles in size every one hundred days.
To help solve the problem, General Hayden commissioned
two teams-one from inside the agency and one from the
outside-and ordered them to perform the bureaucratic
equivalent of exploratory surgery. They both came back with
the virtually the same diagnosis-if NSA was going to survive
into the 21st Century, it would have to quickly evolve from a
moribund, Cold War heirloom into a model of corporate
efficiency. Outside professionals were brought in-once
considered unthinkable in such a secret organization-to manage
the agency's sloppy bookkeeping, expensive acquisitions, and a
dozen other operations. Resources are slowly improving and the
agency had made enormous efforts to hire cyber-savy college
graduates, even holding a job fair at the agency, another
first. Competing with the corporate world for talent is
difficult because of the need for new employees to sign
elaborate secrecy agreements, undergo distasteful polygraph
exams, and snoopy background investigations. The security
procedures are far more stringent than at the FBI, where an
alleged mole was recently caught. In fact, as a result of the
spy arrest, security may get even tighter.
The entire philosophy of how to conduct worldwide
eavesdropping in the age of the Internet and digital data had
to be rethought.
The entire philosophy of how to conduct worldwide
eavesdropping in the age of the Internet and digital data had
to be rethought. The solution was to scrap many of the old
methods-using massive antenna farms to collect outdated high
frequency communications, for example. Ironically, many also
would have preferred to eliminate or greatly reduce the
ancient, expensive EP-3P patrols, another relic of the Cold
War, but the Navy objected. Instead, greater research would go
into tapping fiber optic cables, reverse engineering the
Internet, analyzing the warehouses of information already
collected, and pushing far ahead in developing ever faster and
unique methods of number crunching, such as quantum computing,
a key to codebreaking.
As a result of many of these changes, while the agency
's hearing may not be as fine-tuned as officials would like,
NSA is hardly going deaf. In a highly secret discussion with
senior agency engineers, a top NSA official confirmed that the
spy agency had managed to tap into all forms of modern
communications-including fiber-optic cables-and that the main
problem was finding enough analysts to listen to it all. "The
projections that we made five, six, eight years ago," said the
official, Terry Thompson, "about the increasing volumes of
collection and what that's going to mean for our analysts have
all come true, thanks in large part to the work that you all
and others have done. We're much further ahead now in terms of
being able to access and collect [Internet] network data,
fiber-optics, cellular data, all the different modalities of
communications that we are targeting, and that results in a
lot of output for our analysts."
Thompson, an NSA deputy director until last year when
he was put in charge of the agency's inauguration transition
team, also explained one of the ways NSA taps into the
Internet. They do it, he said, by hiring people away from the
key U.S. companies involved in developing critical components
for the network, such as Cisco Systems. With their help, the
agency "reverse engineers" the components-dissecting them like
a biology student peeling the skin off a frog-looking for weak
spots and vulnerabilities that they can then exploit.
"Virtually all Internet traffic travels across the system of
one company: Cisco Systems," says a Cisco television ad.
Another problem facing NSA is the growing switch by
telecommunications companies from easy to intercept satellite
communications to difficult undersea cables, which are faster
and allow for more circuits. But NSA long ago solved that
problem also. Special submarines were built to plant
sophisticated bugging equipment on the cables. It is a
technique that has been used against Russian and other
undersea networks for years.
In 1975 the USS Halibut, a specially designed nuclear
submarine, sailed into the Sea of Okhotsk, a body of water
nearly surrounded by Russia in the Far East. Like a
moon-lander, she slowly settled down on the mucky bottom,
black clouds of silt rising in the total darkness. In order to
sit on the floor of the sea for weeks at a time, the Halibut
was equipped with unique sled-like skies to keep the round
bottom from rolling. On board was a specially selected NSA
team. Their mission was to tap into one of Russia's most
sensitive undersea communications cables, running from the
Kamchatka Peninsula, home of some of Russia's most sensitive
submarine and missile testing facilities, to Vladivostok,
headquarters of the Soviet Pacific Fleet.
Divers pulled the tap, like a long jumper cable, from
a compartment on the side of the sub and attached it to Soviet
cable at a repeater box-used to amplify the signal. Despite a
near disaster, an emergency that nearly forced the captain to
quickly surface leaving the divers to die at the cable, the
operation proved beyond the expectation of anyone at NSA.
"We could tune in to any of the channels and listen to
them," said team leader John Arnold. "It had all kinds of
stuff-you name it, it was there." Flowing through the cables
and onto NSA's tape recorders were the voices of Soviet
military commanders discussing military and naval operations
and data transfers between commands. Some was in the clear and
some was encrypted. "We turned in probably seven-hundred
recordings, broadband recordings" said Arnold. "NSA was
elated. They had never seen such good recordings-and such
significant material. It was a gold mine for them . . . . The
stuff was so good that NSA wanted more as soon as they could
get it."
To tap into today's sophisticated undersea cables,
the Navy is constructing the most advanced spy submarine ever
built, the USS Jimmy Carter. Due to be completed in 2004, it
will be able to place pod-like taps on fiber-optic cables for
the first time. Hiding the taps from the Russians, however,
has become much more difficult since an NSA employee, Ronald
Pelton, passed on to them many of the details of the earlier
cable tap operation.
Although the world is shifting underneath NSA as a
result of enormous growth and changes in the world's
telecommunications systems, given the right resources-and no
more disasters like the Navy's EP-3E loss-the hypersecret
agency will likely be able to continue to hear a pin drop in
the Kremlin.
James Bamford is the author of Body of Secrets (Doubleday), an
inside look at the National Security Agency from the Cold War
to present.
© 2001 Newsweek, Inc.
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