Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (17 page)

Cold-shouldered
by the Army, Tordella would soon be embraced by the Navy. Spotting his
background on a questionnaire Tordella had filled out for the American Academy
of Science, Laurance Safford, a naval officer and father of the Navy's
codebreaking effort, rolled out the red carpet. By April 1942, Tordella was a
lieutenant (junior grade) assigned to OP-20-G, the Navy's cryptologic
organization, in Washington. Working out of a temporary building on
Constitution Avenue, the lanky Hoosier stood his first watch—supervising
direction-finding operations—after one eight-hour indoctrination.

But before
long, Tordella was using mathematics like a burglar using lock picks, looking
for the array of numbers that would pry open the hellish German cipher machine
known as Enigma. In July 1942, Lieutenant Tordella was transferred to
Bainbridge Island in the state of Washington, a key intercept station for
eavesdropping on Japanese communications. But after several years at the remote
listening post in the Northwest, and with the war beginning to wind down,
Tordella ached to test his skills closer to the front. The opportunity came in
1944, when he received orders to China.

During a
stopover in Washington, D.C., for meetings, however, he learned that he had
been bumped from the assignment. Instead of heading to the war, he boarded a
train to New York City and a special twelve-week course at Bell Laboratories on
new equipment that was designed to decipher Japanese voice codes. Initially,
Tordella was to travel to the South Pacific to test various equipment and
techniques. However, before the system could be deployed the military situation
in the Pacific changed. Tordella was again reassigned, this time as the
officer-in-charge of a
newly established Navy experimental intercept
site at Skaggs Island, an isolated, mosquito-infested wetland near San
Francisco. Here, amid the frogs and snakes and antennas, Tordella sat out the
remainder of the war.

Mustered
out in October 1946, Tordella had not lost his taste for codebreaking. Rather
than return to the classroom in Chicago, he signed on as a civilian
mathematician with the Navy's cryptologic organization, then called the
Communications Supplementary Activity and later the Naval Security Group. With
the formation of NSA in 1952, Tordella transferred over and became chief of
NSA-70, which was responsible for high-level cryptanalysis. A rising star, he was
named deputy director in August 1958.

Because
Tordella had developed a close working relationship with the CIA's chief of
operations, Richard Helms, who would later go on to become director, Blake also
let the mathematician handle the problems that occasionally developed with that
agency. One difficult situation came up when the CIA tried to muscle in on the
NSA's territory by putting out its own signals intelligence reports. "I
left that one to Lou for some reason or another to sort it out," said
Blake. "He and Dick Helms were thick as thieves."

With the
enormous focus on Cuba, Blake barely had enough time to find his office before
the alarm bells began to sound. On July 19, Robert McNamara pushed NSA into
high gear. "NSA has been directed by Sec Def [Secretary of Defense] to
establish a Sigint collection capability in the vicinity of Havana, Cuba,"
Blake immediately notified the Chief of Naval Operations, "as a matter of
the highest intelligence priority." He then pulled the ferret ship USS
Oxford
from its South American patrol and sent it steaming toward Havana.

The
Oxford
was ideally suited for the mission. Where once cases of lima beans, truck
axles, plumbing pipes, and other cargo had been stored, the earphone-clad
intercept operators now sat in front of racks of receivers and reel-to-reel
tape recorders. Up forward, near the bow, voice and Morse collection
specialists twisted dials and searched for signals. Fortunately for NSA, the
Cubans never tried to scramble voice communications. In the background was the
constant rapping of teleprinters printing out intercepted Soviet and Cuban
telexes and other communications. One deck above was a steel forest of
antennas. In the stern, below another forest of spindly metal tree trunks and
stiff wire branches, the Elint specialists listened for the twitters and
warbles of Russian radar on Cuban air bases.

"From
the ship we could look up and down the length of the island," said Harold
L. Parish, a Soviet analyst. As if it were on a cruise to nowhere, the
Oxford
would sail in circles and figure eights for weeks at a time six miles off
Havana's Morro Castle. The ship's slow and lazy pace was especially good for
loitering near key microwave beams, narrow signals that were difficult for
airborne ferrets to pick up. "The quality of the intercept was good,"
Parish said. "Even with the C-130 you were flying kind of fast and you
flew through the [microwave] beams" so that not enough signal was captured
to decipher.

As the
weeks went by, the intercepts became increasingly ominous. On August 17, an
Elint operator on the
Oxford
heard an unusual sound, like the song of a
rare bird out of its normal habitat. It was the electronic call of a Soviet
radar codenamed Whiff, a troubling sound that meant Russian anti-aircraft
weapons had now been set up.

At NSA, a
number of Soviet Sigint experts in A Group were suddenly told to report to the
office of Major General John Davis, the operations chief. "We were called
down and told there was evidence of offensive missiles," said Hal Parish.
They were then sent to help out the Spanish Sigint experts on the Cuba desk in
B Group. "We all descended down there and we formed what was the watch for
the Cuban missile crisis. . . . All the people who were previously associated
with the Cuban target—the management and so forth—kind of disappeared and went
off to the side. We came down and set up the round-the-clock activities and
sort of went from there." Parish said some friction developed between
NSA's civilian and military staffs. "There was some," he said,
"there always is."

In
Washington, within hours of receiving the CRITIC message containing the
intelligence, senior officials began scurrying to meetings. The CIA director,
John McCone, told one high-level group that he believed that the evidence
pointed to the construction of offensive ballistic missiles in Cuba—missiles
that could hit as far north as the southern part of the United States. What
else could the anti-aircraft weapons be protecting? he asked. But both Secretary
of State Dean Rusk and McNamara disagreed, maintaining that the buildup was purely
defensive.

To try to
coordinate much of the data collection, Blake set up NSA's first
around-the-clock Sigint Command Center, which later became the present-day
National Security Operations Center (NSOC). "It was for most of us our
initial contact by telephone with a customer on the other end," said one
of those assigned to the command center. "It was the first time I had ever
talked to colonels from DIA [the Defense Intelligence Agency]. Same with CIA. .
. . We turned on the heavy reporting, both spot and daily report summaries at
that time and twice-daily summaries.....We worked between eight and twenty
hours a day."

Blake
spent much of his time in meetings with the U.S. Intelligence Board. "We
would recess for a few hours so the staff could type something," he said,
"and then we would come back again, and the basic question we were
addressing [was], If we belly up to the Russians, what will they do? Well, I am
sure you realize how hard that question is because you talk about intent, you see,
and you don't read any messages that give you intent. And I recall our final
paper on the subject to the president, pretty much bottom line was 'We think
the Russians will blink.' "

Among the
key problems NSA faced was a shortage of Spanish linguists and, at least in the
early stages of the crisis, a lack of intercept coverage. "One collection
facility . . . against
x
-hundred emitters that were on the air at the
time from the Cuban area," said NSA cryptologist Hal Parish, "we were
just a little short. So that was a problem." Still another concern was the
lack of secure communications between NSA and the listening posts.
"Communications were definitely a problem," Parish said. "Secure
communications. I'd say we were doing advisory support over the open telephone
line." The
Oxford's
unique moon-bounce dish was critical in
relaying both messages and intercepts from Havana's doorstep to the analysts in
the command center. But according to Parish, "It was only a
twelve-hour-a-day system, unfortunately, because the moon was out of sight at
times."

With the
Oxford
now in place, the amount of Sigint concerning Cuba went from a trickle to a
gush. The intercepts clearly showed that the Russians were exercising greater
and greater control over Cuban military activities. "Concentrated efforts
have been made by Bloc pilots and controllers to converse entirely in
Spanish," said one report, "but, on occasion, they have reverted to
their native tongue to convey a difficult command or request to other Bloc
pilots or controllers." Other intercepts revealed nighttime jet gunnery
exercises, bombing practice, and extensive patrols. NSA issued a dramatic
report showing just how massive the sudden buildup was. In the last three
months of 1961, total gross tonnage of ships heading for Cuba was 183,923. But
in just the past two months—July and August of 1962—the gross tonnage had
jumped to 518,196.

Worried
about leaks, Kennedy had ordered a tight lid clamped on the secret intelligence
operations against Cuba. "The President said to put it back in the box and
nail it tight," said Lieutenant General Marshall S. (Pat) Carter, deputy
director of the CIA at the time. At NSA, Blake ordered a new codeword, further
limiting the number of people with access to the information, and extra
restrictions on intercepts revealing offensive weapons. "Sigint evidence
of Cuban acquisition of potentially offensive weapons systems," said the
message, "(e.g., surface-to-surface missiles, bombers, submarines) will .
. . contain preamble 'This is a FUNNEL message' and be forwarded electronically
to DIRNSA [Director, NSA] only at 01 precedence or higher. . . . No, repeat, no
further dissemination is authorized without specific instructions."

For the
airborne eavesdroppers, the skies around Cuba had suddenly become extremely
dangerous. Three times a day an RB-47 Strato-Spy would take off from Macdill
Air Force Base, outside Tampa. Loaded with eavesdropping gear, it would fly
along the Cuban coast, sucking signals from the air. The tapes would quickly be
flown to NSA, where analysts would search for new signals coming from the
vicinity of the surface-to-air missile sites under construction. Other C-130
"flying listening posts" also flew along the coast, just outside
Cuban territory. All the ferrets were equipped with special automatic scanning
devices to instantly pick up SA-2 anti-aircraft—related signals.

At the
White House, President Kennedy discussed the possibility of moving the ferrets
farther from the Cuban coast, but NSA argued against it, even though one of the
missions—the daily routes—was within range of Cuban missiles. The problem was,
the farther it moved from the coast, the fewer signals it could pick up.
"This [equipment] is now operating at the margin of its capability,"
said NSA. "If it is moved further out, the mission, an electronic
intelligence one, might as well be abandoned." While arguing to keep the
planes in harm's way, Blake also made protection of the aircraft the most
important responsibility of the listening posts. "I feel that our first priority
requirement is reporting reaction in connection with high and low level
reconnaissance flights," he notified the commander of NSA's air
contingent.

The
foresight of developing an NSA navy was paying off. Sitting just half a dozen
miles from downtown Havana, the
Oxford
was able to eavesdrop on a wealth
of communications. As a result, Blake requested appropriations for an
additional "shipborne collection platform" for use against Cuba, this
one a large civilian-manned vessel operated by the Military Sea Transportation
Service. "NSA is therefore commencing negotiations," said his message
to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "for the procurement of the USNS
Muller,
a
vessel which can approximate the accommodations and facilities aboard the
Oxford."
But first Blake needed the money.

If Blake
trusted Tordella with all of the agency's secrets, he trusted Congress and
their oversight and appropriations responsibilities with none of them. Asked
how difficult it was to testify fully about NSA's activities before
congressional committees, Blake had a simple answer. "It was very
difficult and, therefore, we didn't do it." Instead, said Blake, "my
technique for that dealt with two gentlemen who were very cooperative"
when it came to probing NSA—that is, there were no questions asked. "Being
able to talk more frankly to them," he added, "and let them see to it
that the rest of the Committee didn't get too far afield was obviously a
tremendous boon to the director and his budget activities." According to
Blake, those two were Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, on the House
Appropriations Committee, and Senator Richard Russell, who occupied a similar
position on the Senate side. "I would have private meetings with those two
only," said Blake. "That was my technique, and it worked beautifully.
. . . My recollection is a pretty successful three years in terms of
resources."

To make up
for the lack of additional people, Blake began yanking intercept operators from
other listening posts around the world and sending them to southern Florida. At
Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Army Sigint personnel attached to the 326th ASA
Company were told to drop everything and board planes for Homestead Air Base
near Miami, a key listening post during the crisis. Eavesdropping aircraft were
moved from their location in Rota, Spain, to air bases in Jacksonville and
Pensacola. From there they would fly down to Key West, pick up intercept
operators, and conduct eight- to ten-hour missions off the Cuban coast.