Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (105 page)

In a nearby office, fellow Aon
employee Sean Rooney had just returned from the last of several futile attempts
to escape to the floor above. But as before, the door was locked, and there
appeared no way out. Now the smoke was becoming heavy and he passed out briefly
on the way back. He touched the office window, and the glass was hot.

Back in his office, Rooney called
his wife, Beverly Eckert. She could hear her husband was having tremendous
difficulty breathing. "How bad is the smoke?" she asked. "Pretty
bad," said Rooney. By now she knew there was little hope left.
"Sean," she said with great sadness, "it doesn't seem to me that
they are going to be able to get to you in time. I think we need to say
good-bye." For the next few minutes, the two talked about their love and
the happy years they had spent together. Eckert said she wished she was there
with him. Rooney asked her to give his love to everyone. "I love
you," he said.

The time was getting very short.
At 9:47, in a nearby office, a woman called fire rescue with an ominous
message. The floor underneath her, she said, was beginning to collapse.

Over the phone, Eckert suddenly
heard an enormous explosion followed by a roaring sound. "It sounded like
Niagara Falls," she recalled. "I knew without seeing that he was
gone." With the phone cradled next to her heart, she walked into another
room, and on the television she could see Tower Two collapsing—the first tower
to go down.

"I will always be grateful
that I was able to be with him at the end and that we had a chance to say
good-bye," Eckert said. "He was so calm. It helped me in those final
moments. So many people missed the last phone call. So many are saying, 'If
only I had a final chance to say good-bye.'"

*    
*     *

It was nearly ten o'clock when the
eleven exhausted, blackened, but alive employees of the American Bureau of
Shipping at last reached the bottom of Tower One, having started down from the
ninety-first floor nearly an hour before. "I was thinking, 'Okay, great,
we're safe,'" recalled Steve Mclntyre. "But outside I could see all
this falling debris flying around. I thought, 'We've been coming down for an
hour, what the hell is this?'"

Mclntyre was helping a fellow
employee named Ruth, who had sprained her ankle. Having made it to the lobby,
the two managed to get across the plaza to an exit on the eastern side where
there was an escalator up to Church Street. "We're okay," Mclntyre
said to Ruth. "We get up this escalator and we're okay."

"And then there was a big
rumble and a huge roar," recalled Mclntyre. "Everybody shouted 'run,'
and then a huge wind came through there. I remember distinctly being lifted off
my feet and blown down the hall, I don't know how far. Ruth was holding onto
me, but we were ripped apart. I had no conception of what was happening. It
went through my mind that a bomb had gone off in the subway. Then the plume
came through and there was an opaque blackness. It was not an absence of light.
It was opaque. My glasses were gone. I put my hand in front of my face and I
couldn't see it. "I thought, 'A bomb has gone off and I'm going to die
right here of smoke inhalation.' Then I realized that it wasn't smoke, that it
was just very heavy air. There was all this stuff on the floor, but it was
light stuff. I was coated in it, as if I'd been immersed in a vat of butter.
And the exposed skin on my arm was all pocked from tiny glass shards, maybe a
hundred of them. We must have been on the very edge of the blast field when
Number Two came down." In the darkness, Mclntyre ran into a glass
storefront, but eventually he saw a flashlight beam and heard someone yelling,
"Come to me." A short time later, Mclntyre again saw daylight and
freedom. Less than a half hour later, Tower One also collapsed.

At 9:55, almost the same moment
that Tower Two collapsed, President Bush, his photo op now over, finally
departed Sarasota, Florida, aboard
Air Force One
for the bunker in
Nebraska.

*    
*     *

In the hours and days following
the attacks, NSA quickly began mobilizing nearly every man, woman, and machine
to detect any further terrorist activities and to find Osama bin Laden and
other members of his organization. Almost immediately after the incidents
began, black-ninja-suited members of the Emergency Reaction Team, armed with
Colt 9 mm submachine guns, took up posts around Crypto City. The number of
bomb-sniffing dogs was also increased; the NSA Museum was shut down; and the
Executive Protection Unit, the director's bodyguards, beefed up.

The National Security Operations
Center (NSOC), which directs the agency's worldwide eavesdropping activities,
was converted into a war room. Superfast CRITIC messages—"critical
intelligence" reports of the highest importance—began going out to field
stations around the world every time a new piece of the puzzle was discovered,
such as the names of the hijackers obtained from the passenger manifest lists.
These CRITICs were distributed almost instantly throughout the intelligence
community over the agency's on-line National SIGINT File. Whenever a new CRITIC
appeared, officials were notified by a flashing message in the top left corner
of their computer screen.

A crisis management team moved
into Room 8020, the director's large conference room, an elaborate minitheater
just down the hall from the General Hayden's office. Another group began
meeting continuously in the NSOC conference room. Old intercept tapes were
pulled out of storage and checked for clues that might have been missed. Every
new piece of information was fed into the organization's massive computer
database to see if there would be a hit.

Room 3E132, the Special Support
Activity, became a hub of activity. The group provides cryptologic assistance
to military commanders around the world. Units known as Cryptologic Service
Groups (CSGs) bring NSA in microcosm to the national security community and
forces in the field. Soon after the attacks, hundreds of NSA cryptologists
supplemented the small CSG assigned to the U.S. Operations Command at MacDill
Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. Others CSGs were activated and eventually
sent to liaise with the units in the Near and Middle East.

Another group that shifted into
high gear was the Special Collection Service, the clandestine joint NSA—CIA
organization that covertly travels around the world attempting to tap into
difficult communications channels.

All over the world and in space,
listening posts and satellites quickly shifted from their other targets and
began concentrating on Afghanistan and the Middle East.

But despite the valiant human
effort and the billions of dollars spent on high-flying hardware and
super-complex software, for at least two years before the attacks and (as of
this writing) three months after the attacks, NSA had no idea where Osama bin
Laden and his key associates were—or even if they were still in Afghanistan.

As tens of millions of
communications continue to be vacuumed up by NSA every hour, the system has
become overwhelmed as a result of too few analysts. "U.S. intelligence
operates what is probably the largest information processing environment in the
world," recalled former NSA director William O. Studeman. "Consider
this: Just one intelligence collection system alone can generate a million
inputs per half-hour." That enormous volume, according to John Millis, the
former staff director of House Select Committee on Intelligence and a former
CIA officer, is exactly the problem. "We don't come near to processing,
analyzing, and disseminating the intelligence we collect right now," he
said. "We're totally out of balance."

According to NSA's director,
Lieutenant General Hayden, the problem is in the numbers. "Forty years ago
there were five thousand standalone computers, no fax machines, and not one
cellular phone. Today, there are over one hundred eighty million computers—most
of them networked. There are roughly fourteen million fax machines and forty
million cell phones, and those numbers continue to grow. The telecommunications
industry is making a one trillion-dollar investment to encircle the world in
millions of miles of high bandwidth fiber-optic cable. They are aggressively
investing in the future." Thus, adds Hayden, "Osama bin Laden has at
his disposal the wealth of a three trillion-dollars-a-year telecommunications
industry." At the same time, he said, "the National Security Agency
is lagging behind."

The numbers only get worse.
According to a 2001 Congressional report on NSA, the agency is "faced with
profound 'needle-in-the-haystack' challenges" as a result of
"telephone service that has grown by approximately 18 percent annually
since 1992," and the explosion in worldwide telephone service to some
eighty-two billion minutes by 1997.

The problem of system overload
went from bad to critical in February 2000 when NSA's entire computing system
crashed for nearly four days. "NSA headquarters was brain dead,"
Hayden candidly admitted. "This was really bad." Then, not mincing words,
he said, "NSA is in great peril," adding, "We're behind the
curve in keeping up with the global telecommunications revolution. In the
previous world order, our primary adversary was the Soviet Union.
Technologically we had to keep pace with an oligarchic, resource-poor, technologically
inferior, over-bureaucratized, slow-moving nation-state. Our adversary
communications are now based upon the developmental cycle of a global industry
that is literally moving at the speed of light . . . cell phones, encryption,
fiber-optic communications, digital communications."

Simply sending 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 can the three computers on his
desk communicate with one another.

Even if the system could pick up
and process all the critical communications, most of it would go unread for
days or weeks, if at all, as a result of an enormous lack of specialists in many
key languages, including those used in Afghanistan. By September 10, the number
of NSA language specialists expert in the Afghan languages—Pashtun and Dari—was
almost nonexistent. According to one senior intelligence official, they could
be counted on one hand with fingers left over. "There's simply too much
out there, and it's too hard to understand," said Hayden. Congressional
analysts agreed. "NSA is," said a report issued in 2001, "not
well positioned to analyze developments among the assortment of terrorist
groups."

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—over 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.

By the summer of 2001, the agency
had at last put together a language database showing who in the agency speaks
what languages and where in the world they are located. By the fall, Meyer
said, she hoped to complete a Daily Language Readiness Indices—a daily printout
of the constantly changing database that would be placed on the director's desk
every morning. Thus, in the event of a crisis, such as the attacks on September
11, the agency could identify and locate immediately everyone who speaks 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. The
terrorists of September 11, however, did not wait. "The bad guys are
everywhere. The bad guys do not always speak English," she said. "We
are not always ready for the bad guys."

Adding to
the problems, the agency has become spread far too thinly. Largely as a result
of politics, NSA has become burdened with thousands of targets that pose little
immediate risk to the nation while drawing critical resources away from those,
like bin Laden and Al Qaeda, that are truly dangerous and time sensitive. One
of those targets in which far too many resources are spent is China. Since the
end of the Cold War, a number of fire-breathing conservatives and China hawks
have sought to turn it into a new Soviet Union. Among those is Robert Kagan, a
former aide to State Department official Elliot Abrams. "The Chinese
leadership views the world today in much the same way Kaiser Wilhelm II did a
century ago," Kagan said in an address to the Foreign Relations Committee.
Another is Michael Ledeen, a key player in the Reagan administration's
arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. "So long as China remains a ruthless
Communist dictatorship," he wrote in the
Weekly Standard,
"the
inevitability of conflict must inform all our thinking and planning."

As a result of this new
containment policy, fully endorsed by the Bush administration, millions of
dollars and thousands of people are used for such things as daily, Cold
War—style eavesdropping patrols throughout the area, such as the one that
crash-landed on China's Hainan Island in the spring of 2001.