A Pretext for War (15 page)

According to General Hayden, the problem was in the numbers. “We are digging out of a deep hole,” he said. To help correct the budget problems that caused so much grief for his predecessor, Hayden hired a chief financial manager, a first for NSA. Going outside the agency, Hayden chose Beverly Wright, a Harvard MBA with a background in investment banking. At the time of her selection, she was chief financial officer at Legg Mason Wood Walker in Baltimore, Maryland. Her job, according to Hayden, was to develop a management strategy for the agency and to “ensure that our mission drives our budget decisions” and not the other way around.

The hiring of Wright was no mere window dressing. When Hayden arrived at NSA, he found an ax waiting for him. Congress and the Clinton administration had directed that he slice away at the agency’s personnel levels more than at any other time in history. In order to reduce the personnel rolls, NSA for the first time began turning over to outside contractors highly sensitive work previously performed exclusively by NSA employees, and scaled back its hiring to only about a hundred new employees a year. Ominously, a commission established to look into the intelligence community saw problems down the road in such a drastic cutback in hiring. “This is simply insufficient to maintain the health and continuity of the workforce,” the report said. It went on to warn that if the pattern continued, NSA would face a future where large segments of its workforce will leave “at roughly the same time without a sufficient cadre of skilled personnel to carry on the work.”

According to Hayden, “NSA downsized about one-third of its manpower and about the same proportion of its budget in the decade of the 1990s. That is the same decade when packetized communications (the e-communications we have all become familiar with) surpassed traditional communications. That is the same decade when mobile cell phones increased from 16 million to 741 million—an increase of nearly 50 times. That is the same decade when Internet users went from about 4 million to 361 million—an increase of over 90 times. Half as many landlines were laid in the last six years of the 1990s as in the whole previous history of the world. In that same decade of the 1990s, international telephone traffic went from 38 billion minutes to over 100 billion. [By 2002] the world’s population will spend over 180 billion minutes on the phone in international calls alone.”

Looking back, said Hayden, no one would have predicted such enormous growth. “Forty years ago, there were 5,000 standalone computers, no fax machines, and not one cellular phone. Today, there are over 180 million computers—most of them networked. There are roughly 14 million fax machines . . . and those numbers continue to grow. The telecommunications industry is making a $1 trillion investment to encircle the world in millions of miles of high-bandwidth fiber-optic cable. They are aggressively investing in the future.”

Simply sending an internal e-mail, Hayden discovered, was a major problem. It takes “an act of God,” he said, to send an e-mail message to all of the agency’s 38,000 employees because of NSA’s sixty-eight separate e-mail systems. Nor could the three computers on his desk communicate with one another.

Even if the system could eavesdrop on and process all the critical communications, most of it would go unread for days or weeks, if at all. This is a result of NSA’s enormous lack of specialists in many key languages. By the summer of 2001, the number of NSA language specialists expert in the Afghan languages—Pashto and Dari—was almost nil. According to one senior intelligence official, they could be counted on one hand with fingers left over.

Aware of its myriad—and dangerous—shortcomings, the agency was attempting to self-diagnose its various disorders, some of which had become very obvious to Congressman Porter Goss, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “What we said basically was we see a lot of management and very little leadership. And there is a major difference,” said Tim Sample, Goss’s staff director. “And we said that we saw a lot of people trying to do a lot of good work, but that Sigint in the future was in peril. And they were fairly harsh words, and they got a lot of people upset, though my sense is for those in the workforce there was a lot of head shaking up and down, going yeah, how do we fix this. And I will say this now, and I will say it again and again, the issue here was facing change.”

Part of the problem, said Sample, was an attitude of self-reliance. “There was an attitude of ‘we’ll do it ourselves, thank you very much.’ We understand that there are some changes, but we’ve been doing pretty well with what we’ve been doing, thank you. . . . There was an issue of financial accountability, and that was at best elusive. There was a sense of protecting fiefdoms. . . . From a management standpoint, we saw a major protection of bureaucracy. Many managers, especially at the more senior levels, didn’t accept the writing on the wall. Not just the congressional writing on the wall, but the intelligence, the target writing on the wall. That somehow in our view, some of the management lost touch with the workforce.”

Realizing that NSA’s very existence depended on reform, Hayden issued an edict: “Our agency must undergo change if we are to remain viable in the future.” Like someone who had just inherited an old car, Hayden decided to call in the repairmen to give him an estimate on what was wrong and suggestions on how to fix it. He put together two groups, one made up of middle-ranking insiders and the other composed of outside experts, to take a close look at what makes NSA tick, and directed them to write up report cards on what they found.

At the time, among the greatest obstacles to change were a number of hard-line traditionalists, among them the agency’s deputy director, Barbara McNamara. They were constantly resisting the growing pressures to break away from NSA’s insular, secrecy-obsessed culture and reach out to industry for help.

Yet members of the inside panel—whom Hayden referred to as “responsible anarchists”—had no hesitation in outlining a decade of mismanagement, bureaucratic squabbling, and poor leadership. Among the key findings was a need for “profound change [or] the nation will lose a powerful weapon in its arsenal.” It pointed to the following specifics:

• NSA has failed to begin the organizational transformation necessary for success in the Information Age.

• NSA has been in a leadership crisis for the better part of a decade.

• Systems development is out of control.

• Duplicative efforts flourish because we have no single point of control for reviewing development across organizations.

• Critical data required by decision-makers . . . are often unavailable or difficult to retrieve.

• Decisions on financial resources, human resources, and customer engagement are often late or fatally flawed.

“In a broad sense,” Hayden said, the panels painted a picture of “an agency that did not communicate with itself, or with others, well. Which—my view now, not theirs—is the by-product of a great deal of compartmentalization and insularity built up over almost half a century. A management culture that found it difficult to make the tough decisions, largely because the decisions were so tough.” Also, he said, “They found that accountability was too diffused throughout the agency. I’ve used the phrase ‘You damn near have to rent Camden Yards [home baseball field of the Baltimore Orioles] to get everybody that thinks he has a piece of the action in on a meeting.’”

On November 15, 1999, General Hayden instituted his “100 Days of Change.” It was an ambitious plan to put many of the reforms into place in a little more than three months. At the same time, he sought to consolidate his power in order to blunt any opposition from the conservatives. “Even the best game plan,” he warned, quoting legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, “ain’t got no chance if the players don’t execute it.”

To deal with the growing language problems, Hayden turned to agency veteran Renee Meyer and appointed her the agency’s first Senior Language Authority.

According to Meyer, even though nearly half the world (47 percent) speaks English, there is a growing tendency for people to return to local languages. “Cultural pride has reemerged,” said Meyer. “People use their ‘own’ languages, and there are all kinds of speakers.” The number of languages being used around the world, she said, is enormous—more than 6,500—many of which are growing. Also, it takes a tremendous amount of time to train language analysts in many of these “low-density” languages, such as those used in Afghanistan. Simply to reach the minimum professional capability—level 3—takes from three to eight years of study.

In the summer of 2001, the agency had at last completed a language database showing who in the agency spoke what languages and where in the world they were located. By the fall of that year, Meyer said, she hoped to complete Daily Language Readiness Indices—daily printouts of the constantly changing database that would be placed on the director’s desk every morning. Thus, in the event of a crisis, the agency could identify and immediately locate everyone who spoke the critical languages of the area. When she was appointed to the new position, Director Hayden told her she had until October 15, 2001, to fix the system. A few months earlier, a congressional report issued a warning: “NSA is . . . not well-positioned to analyze developments among the assortment of terrorist groups.”

CHAPTER 6

POTOMAC

For the residents of Bells Mill, a small neighborhood of drowsy homes in the well-heeled Maryland town of Potomac, the sight of the two black bulletproof SUVs, with Uzi-toting agents peering out the open rear windows, had become a daily routine. Early in the morning and early in the evening they would quietly arrive, one blocking traffic and the other pulling into the driveway of a tree-shrouded house in the middle of the block. Shortly after 7:00
A.M.
on September 10, 2001, George John Tenet, the bulldog-chested CIA Director, stepped into the back seat. Waiting for him was the agency’s presidential briefer along with a black, leather-bound folder with the presidential seal and gold letters—
PRESIDENT
’
S DAILY BRIEF.

Better known simply as the PDB, the document inside the folder summarizes the most important world events over the past twenty-four hours based on analysis of all U.S. intelligence capabilities, from spinning satellites to clandestine agents. It is perhaps the single most important report produced by the agency. “We truly are speaking truth to power,” boasted the CIA’s top analyst, Jami Miscik.

A right turn on Democracy Lane, a left on Democracy Boulevard, eighteen more miles, and the heavily armored Ford Explorer would pull into the White House for the 8:00
A.M.
briefing of President Bush. The twenty-five-minute ride would give Tenet a chance to make notes and read over the backup documents, such as communications intercepts and satellite photos, the aide had brought along. Prior to going to bed the night before, Tenet had already looked it over and made changes. Later, CIA analysts on the midnight shift updated the intelligence and printed up a final version.

During the previous administration, Tenet had a cool and distant relationship with President Clinton, who would occasionally keep his intelligence chiefs at arm’s length. One former CIA director, R. James Woolsey, had only two semiprivate meetings with the President in two years and referred to his relationship with Clinton as “nonexistent.” But although he had little use for the oral briefings, at least in the beginning of his presidency, he was an avid reader of the PDB, which normally ran around a dozen pages and often contained detailed analysis. Despite the secrecy and exclusivity of the PDB, Clinton would often complain that most days the document contained much that he had already read elsewhere. As a result, he allowed the PDB to be sent around to a wider circle of officials than previous presidents had permitted.

Bush, however, decided to limit the distribution of the PDB to only his top cabinet members and White House aides. At the same time, he reduced the size of the report to just seven to ten pages. With less analysis than before, most items were brief—less than a page in length. It was prepared, said one former senior intelligence official, with the understanding that Bush was a “multimodality learner who processes information better through questions and answers while reading along.” In other words, he wasn’t much of a reader.

Bush may have inherited a fondness for the PBD from his father. Charles A. Peters, who served for fourteen years as the CIA’s chief presidential briefer, said he briefed President Ronald Reagan only three times during his eight years in the White House. Vice President Bush, however, would get a briefing from Peters every morning around eight in his office in the Old Executive Office Building.

When he moved from the vice president’s office into the White House, Bush continued his morning briefings. “The Presidential Daily Brief was the first order of business on my calendar,” he said. “I made it a point from day one to read the PDB in the presence of a CIA officer and either [National Security Advisor] Brent [Scowcroft] or his deputy.” Peters said Bush was very careful to keep the PDB free of political influence. Once, he recalled, Bush became very angry when he learned that cabinet members were trying to influence him by making suggestions on what the CIA should put into the Daily Brief. John L. Helgerson, the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence while Bush was president, agreed. “He did not want us talking to anybody else,” said Helgerson, who was responsible for assembling and editing the PDB. “It was his book, and he wanted to decide what went in it.”