Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (21 page)

But
Kennedy emphasized that there could be no deal of any kind. "Any steps
toward easing tensions in other parts of the world largely depended on the
Soviet Union and Mr. Khrushchev taking action in Cuba and taking it
immediately." According to his memorandum, "I repeated to him that
this matter could not wait and that he had better contact Mr. Khrushchev and
have a commitment from him by the next day to withdraw the missile bases under
United Nations supervision for otherwise, I said, there would be drastic
consequences."

Shortly
after Kennedy left, Dobrynin sent an enciphered cable to Khrushchev. "
'Because of the plane that was shot down, there is now strong pressure on the
president to give an order to respond with fire if fired upon,' " he
wrote, quoting Kennedy. " 'A real war will begin, in which millions of
Americans and Russians will die.' ... Kennedy mentioned as if in passing that
there are many unreasonable heads among the generals, and not only among the
generals, who are 'itching for a fight.'... The situation might get out of
control, with irreversible consequences."

Then the
ambassador relayed Kennedy's proposal. "The most important thing for us,
Kennedy stressed, is to get as soon as possible the agreement of the Soviet
government to halt further work on the construction of the missile bases in
Cuba and take measures under international control that would make it
impossible to use these weapons. In exchange the government of the USA is
ready, in addition to repealing all measures on the 'quarantine,' to give the
assurances that there will not be any invasion of Cuba. . . . 'And what about
Turkey,' I asked R. Kennedy. 'If that is the only obstacle . . . then the
president doesn't see any unsurmountable difficulties in resolving this issue.
. . . However, the president can't say anything public in this regard about
Turkey,' R. Kennedy said again. R. Kennedy then warned that his comments about
Turkey are extremely confidential; besides him and his brother, only 2—3 People
know about it in Washington. . . . R. Kennedy gave me a number of a direct
telephone line to the White House." Once again Dobrynin quoted Robert
Kennedy. " 'Time is of the essence and we shouldn't miss the chance.'
"

Robert
Kennedy returned to the White House, where the members of the Executive
Committee held a late-night session. McNamara recommended, and the president
approved, the call-up of twenty-four air reserve squadrons, involving 14,200
personnel and 300 troop carriers. President Kennedy then said that if the
reconnaissance planes were fired on the
next day, "then we should
take out the SAM sites in Cuba by air action."

At a
late-night meeting at the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that
"unless irrefutable evidence of the dismantling of the offensive weapons
in Cuba were obtained," an air strike should be launched no later than
October 29.

Shortly
before midnight, Hal Parish entered NSA for his midnight—to—eight A.M. shift.
"When I reported in," he said, "there was a note there to have
by six o'clock the following morning in the hands of the White House the
wrap-up of the U-2 shootdown. Wasn't hard to do—we had about two minutes, three
minutes of tracking on it ... just some tracking coming in from just north of
Guantanamo . . . seemed to be a SAM that brought him down. . . . There was
nothing that I ever saw in communication indicating who (whether a Soviet or a
Cuban) pushed the button. . . . About two years later, from some intercept that
was picked up on one of the aircraft carriers, we got the entire tracking
sequence of the shootdown. We got the whole mission tracking from the time he hit
Cuba all the way down until he made his turn over Guantanamo and then the
tracking sort of ceased...."

On Sunday
morning, October 28, a new message from Khrushchev was broadcast on Radio
Moscow. "The Soviet government," said the announcement, "has
issued a new order on the dismantling of the weapons which you describe as
'offensive,' and their crating and return to the Soviet Union." The crisis
was over.

As the
Russians began withdrawing, NSA continued its intensive watch. "I remember
during the period from the time I went down in October," Hal Parish
recalled, "there was not a day I did not come to work until Christmas.
Then I just took part of Christmas Day off." For the eavesdroppers, things
changed dramatically. Suddenly the need for the Russians to hide their presence
on Cuba disappeared, so in addition to Spanish, many Russian-language
communications were being intercepted. "All the communications that we had
that were Cuban turned Soviet and we had what had to be called the Soviet
forces in Cuba," said Parish. "Suddenly, these Spanish-speaking
pilots disappeared and were replaced by Russian pilots. The [Soviet] . . .
communications in the HF [high-frequency] area at that time appeared again
virtually overnight."

Intercept
operators listened as the ballistic missile sites were dismantled and the SAM
sites were turned over to the Cubans. "After the offensive weapons were
removed, some of the supportive weapons were also removed," Parish said.
Each time a SAM site was turned over to the Cubans, various signals changed.
"So we were able through Elint to tell when the Soviets were pulling out
of a given SAM site. We got an entire training schedule in Havana where they
were talking about how they were going to train the Cubans."

As the
Soviets pulled out, NSA detected tense relations between them and Cuban forces.
According to Parish, one telephone conversation involved a very large shipment
of tainted meat that the Soviets had sent the Cubans. Castro himself was
intercepted saying "very, very bad things about the Russians," Parish
said. "And in fact we were required to read that over the telephone to—I'm
not sure who it was, State Department, CIA, DIA—but we had to have a translator
read this sort of verbatim over the line and he [Castro] had some very, very,
harsh and bad things to say about the Russians. I do recall the gentleman
turning red as he was reading this because they wanted a verbatim translation
of it." In fact, the original transcript sent to the White House contained
deletions in place of Castro's expletives. Almost immediately Robert Kennedy
called NSA and demanded that they send the uncensored version—blue language and
all.

"During
the crisis," said Parish, "I have no doubt they [the missile sites]
were under Soviet control, and in fact we pretty well know they were totally
Soviet manned." According to another NSA official, "There were times
when the Cubans and the Soviets were—I don't mean fighting literally, but
contesting each other as to who was in charge of the missile site, and you'd
hear Spanish cursing in the background and Soviet unhappiness."

At the
time of the crisis, neither the NSA nor the CIA knew whether the Soviets had
any nuclear warheads in Cuba. "We had photographs of missile
launchers," said Robert McNamara, "but we thought the warheads were
yet to come." It was only in the 1990s that the truth was discovered.
"It took thirty years to learn there were 161 nuclear warheads there,
including 90 tactical warheads to be used against an invasion," McNamara
said. Then, holding two fingers a fraction of an inch apart, he added,
"And we came that close to an invasion. . . . We came so close—both
Kennedy and Khrushchev felt events were slipping outside their control. . . .
The world came within a hair breadth of nuclear war."

As Soviet
ships navigated through the Caribbean on their long voyage home, their decks
crowded with hastily crated missiles and launchers, Khrushchev may have been
chuckling. While the United States focused on the offensive ballistic missiles
brought to Cuba, none of which were likely ever to have been used, Khrushchev
had been monitoring the progress of a far more secret and far more useful
construction project on the island. It was to be a major Soviet intelligence
coup. In a sparsely populated area known as Lourdes, just southeast of Havana,
Soviet technicians continued work on one of the largest eavesdropping bases
ever built.

NSA
surrounded the Soviet Union with listening posts and ferret flights during the
1950s and early 1960s. Every time a new monitoring station was built,
Khrushchev felt the electronic noose grow tighter. In Germany, Turkey, Iran,
Pakistan, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere, intercept operators noted every time an
aircraft took off or a ship left port. Telemetry was collected from Soviet missiles,
and telephone conversations were snatched from the air.

Khrushchev
knew he could not reciprocate. There were no Soviet allies along America's
borders to accommodate Russian eavesdroppers. Thus the USSR was forced to send
antenna-covered trawlers crawling along America's coasts. It was a cumbersome
and expensive proposition. For every trawler bobbing in the waves, five
thousand miles from home, a fleet of support vessels was needed because the
trawlers could not pull into port. Fuel had to be supplied, equipment had to be
repaired, food had to be delivered, and the endless tapes had to be brought
back to Moscow to be analyzed and translated. Castro solved all Khrushchev's
problems and provided Moscow with an electronic window on the United States into
the twenty-first century.

Over a
vast area of twenty-eight square miles, Soviet engineers and signals
intelligence specialists erected acres of antennas to eavesdrop on American
communications. Diamond-shaped rhombic antennas, pointing like daggers at the
U.S. coast only ninety miles away, tapped into high-frequency signals carrying
telephone calls as far away as Washington. Large dishes were set up to collect
signals from American satellites. High wires were strung to pick up the
very-low-frequency submarine broadcasts. Giant rectangular antennas, like
drive-in movie screens, were erected to intercept microwave signals. Windowless
cement buildings were built to house the intercept operators, the
code-breakers, and the walls of printers that would rattle out miles of
intercepted data communications. Khrushchev might have lost a fist, but he had
gained an ear.

With the
crisis over and the threat of nuclear war now abated, attention once again
turned toward covert operations within Cuba. Earlier, shortly after learning of
the offensive missiles on October 15, an angry Robert Kennedy had called a
meeting of the Operation Mongoose cabal. He opened the meeting by expressing
"the general dissatisfaction of the President" with the progress of
Mongoose. He pointed out that the operation had been under way for a year, that
the results were discouraging, that there had been no acts of sabotage, and
that even the one that had been attempted had failed twice.

Richard
Helms, the CIA's deputy planning director, later commented: "I stated that
we were prepared to get on with the new action program and that we would
execute it aggressively." NSA, however, discovered that among the sabotage
targets of Operation Mongoose were several key Cuban communications
facilities—the same facilities that NSA was eavesdropping on, deriving a great
deal of signals intelligence. Officials quickly, and loudly, protested.
"We suggested to them that it was really not the smartest thing to
do," said Hal Parish.

In fact,
in the days following the crisis, NSA did everything it could to secretly keep
the Cuban telecommunications system fully working. The more communications
equipment broke or burned out, the less NSA could intercept, and thus the less
the U.S. intelligence community knew about Cuba. Adding to the problems was the
economic embargo of Cuba, which kept out critical electrical supplies such as
vacuum tubes for military radios. NSA devised a covert channel by which to
supply these components to the Cuban government.

"The
tubes would burn out, requests would come in, and backdoor methods had to be
utilized in order to get the necessary tubes in to keep this RCA-designed
system on the air so we could continue to collect it," said Parish.
"I think a lot of them were channeled through Canada at the time, because
the Canadians had relations with the Cubans. When the tubes would wear
out—these were not small tubes, these were large tubes and components—they
would make contact with somebody and the word would reach us and they would
come to see the agency, the right part of it, and we would insist that those
things be provided."

As the
danger of nuclear war with Russia receded like a red tide, Cuba once again came
into full view and the Kennedy administration returned to combat mode. NSA
continued to listen with one ear cocked toward Russia and the other toward
Cuba. Just before Christmas 1962 McCone wrote to McGeorge Bundy, "NSA will
continue an intensive program in the Sigint field, which has during recent
weeks added materially to all other intelligence."

On
Havana's doorstep, the civilian-manned USNS
Muller
relieved the
Oxford,
and ferret flights kept up their patrols a dozen miles off the Cuban coast.
Because the
Muller
was civilian, its crew got less liberty time than a
military crew would, so the ship was able to spend a greater percentage of its
time at sea—about twenty-five days a month—than Navy ships such as the
Oxford.
It was home ported in Port Everglades, the commercial port for Fort
Lauderdale.

"Duty
station for the
Muller
was seven miles off Havana," said Bill Baer,
the operations officer on the ship at the time. "We and Castro recognized
the six-mile limit, so seven miles was a small safety valve. We traveled back
and forth on a six-mile track parallel to the coast. The major reason for this
particular spot was a multichannel UHF national communications system that RCA
had installed. It ran from Havana, east and west, along the spine of the island
and connected Havana with each city in the country." Traveling slowly back
and forth, the
Muller
had a direct tap into much of Cuba's
communications.