Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (22 page)

But the
spy ship was no secret from Castro and he would occasionally vent his anger.
"We only had a selection of small arms including M-l rifles, carbines,
shotguns, and so forth," recalled Baer. "We took this responsibility
very seriously because we knew the Cubans knew who we were and they used to do
things to harass us."

In an
unusual move, Baer was made operations officer on the ship even though he was
an Army officer. He had been stationed at NSA when he heard of the opening and
volunteered. Another Army intercept operator on board was Mike Sannes.
"Since they used microwave, we had to be [in] line-of-sight," Sannes
explained. "Castro used to call us the 'big ear.' One time we knew he was
going to crash a small plane into us and then board us in an 'act of mercy.' We
had a spotter in the mast— remember this is a civilian ship and had no [large]
guns—he saw the plane approaching and we were monitoring on the hand-held
radio. Suddenly everything went quiet. A few minutes later he came running in
saying, 'I'm not staying up there. He's going to hit us!' They scrambled some
jets from Key West who were on alert, and they chased him off."

Sannes
said Cuban harassment was common. "Often they sent gunboats out to harass
us, sometimes every few hours so we couldn't sleep. Occasionally they shot
across our bow. We had a real gung-ho skipper. We had scuttles fore and aft. We
would have sunk the boat if we were in danger of being boarded. . . . Once the
engine quit and we started drifting into shore. It was very early on a foggy
morning. We drifted close enough into Havana harbor that we were looking up at
the hotels on the beach. We got the engine working and headed back out to sea.
They never noticed us."

To assist
the CIA's covert operations in Cuba, NSA intercept operators were assigned to
monitor the communications of anti-Castro forces. On January 16 one of these
technicians picked up a conversation from an individual in downtown Havana who
said, "It would be a good idea to assassinate Fidel on El Cocuyo
Road." The intercept operator noted on his report, "This group must
be penetrated."

Amusingly,
one of the most important pieces of information to come along came not from an
NSA intercept of a diplomatic cable to Moscow but from a ten-hour interview
Castro gave to Lisa Howard, a reporter for ABC News. In the interview, Castro
clearly indicated for the first time that he was hoping for a rapprochement
with the United States. The CIA acquired a transcript of the interview
secretly, through an NSA intercept before the broadcast.

Upon
receiving the information, the CIA's John McCone became extremely worried that
word would leak out about their possession of it. On May 2, 1963, CIA Deputy
Director Marshall Carter wrote to Bundy:

Mr. McCone
cabled me this morning stating that he cannot overemphasize the importance of
secrecy in this matter and requested that I take all appropriate steps along
this line to reflect his personal views on its sensitivity. Mr. McCone feels
that gossip and inevitable leaks with consequent publicity would be most
damaging. He suggests that no active steps be taken on the rapprochement matter
at this time and urges most limited Washington discussions, and that in these
circumstances emphasis should be placed in any discussions on the fact that the
rapprochement track is being explored as a remote possibility and one of
several alternatives involving various levels of dynamic and positive action.
In view of the foregoing, it is requested that the Lisa Howard report be
handled in the most limited and sensitive manner.

Throughout
the summer of 1963, there were endless discussions of sabotage—which targets to
strike, what kind of explosives to use, whether the strike should come from
inside Cuba or outside it, whether local volunteers or paid agents should be
used. But even while the CIA hawks were plotting their campaign of sabotage, a
group of Kennedy administration doves, including UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson,
were working on another track. Attached to Stevenson's UN mission in New York
was William Attwood, who had previously served as U.S. ambassador to Guinea in
West Africa. Attwood had met Castro and spent considerable time with him on a
number of occasions while practicing his earlier profession as a journalist. A
Guinean diplomat had told him of a recent meeting with Castro in which the
Cuban leader had expressed his dissatisfaction with his status as a Soviet satellite
and was looking for a way out. The diplomat told Attwood of Castro's
receptiveness to changing course and moving toward nonalignment. Attwood
received a similar message from another friend, Lisa Howard.

As the CIA
continued to plot sabotage missions, President Kennedy began to explore
Castro's apparent olive branch. He approved a quiet approach by Attwood to Dr.
Carlos Lechuga, Cuba's ambassador to the UN, using ABC's Lisa Howard as a
go-between. On September 23, a small party was arranged at Howard's New York
City apartment and both Lechuga and Attwood were invited. The diplomatic
matchmaking was successful. "Lechuga hinted that Castro was indeed in a
mood to talk," Attwood said later in a secret memorandum. "Especially
with someone he had met before. He thought there was a good chance that I might
be invited to Cuba if I wished to resume our 1959 talk." Robert Kennedy
thought the idea had some merit but was against Attwood traveling to Cuba; he
saw the trip as "risking the accusation that we were trying to make a deal
with Castro." Kennedy preferred that the meeting take place either in New
York, during a visit by Castro to the UN, or in a neutral country, such as
Mexico.

Howard,
continuing in her role as unofficial intermediary, mentioned Attwood to Major
Rene Vallejo, a Cuban surgeon who was also Castro's right-hand man and
confidant. On October 51, Vallejo called Howard, telling her that Castro would
very much like to talk to Attwood anytime and appreciated the importance of
discretion to all concerned. Castro, he said, would therefore be willing to
secretly send a plane to Mexico to pick up Attwood and fly him to a private
airport near Veradero where Castro would talk to him alone. The plane would fly
him back immediately after the talk. In this way there would be no risk of
identification at Havana airport.

Vallejo
sent a further message to Attwood, through Howard, on November 11. "Castro
would go along with any arrangements we might want to make," Attwood wrote
in a memorandum. "He specifically suggested that a Cuban plane could come
to Key West and pick up the emissary; alternatively they would agree to have
him come in a U.S. plane which could land at one of several 'secret airfields'
near Havana. He emphasized that only Castro and himself would be present at the
talks and that no one else—he specifically mentioned [Che] Guevara—would be
involved. Vallejo also reiterated Castro's desire for this talk and hoped to
hear our answer soon."

But
President Kennedy insisted that before any U.S. official travel to Cuba,
Vallejo or some other Castro representative come to the United States to
outline a proposal. He also demanded absolute secrecy concerning the
discussions. "At the President's instruction I was conveying this message
orally and not by cable," McGeorge Bundy told Attwood, extremely worried
about a leak or a written record. He added in a memorandum for the record,
"The President hoped he [Attwood] would get in touch with Vallejo to
report that it did not seem practicable to us at this stage to send an American
official to Cuba and that we would prefer to begin with a visit by Vallejo to
the U.S. where Attwood would be glad to see him and to listen to any messages
he might bring from Castro."

Attwood
passed the message through Howard to Vallejo, and a few days later they spoke
together on the telephone for the first time. One Friday, he sent a memorandum
to the White House detailing the conversation. "Vallejo's manner was
extremely cordial," Attwood noted. "He said that 'we' would send
instructions to Lechuga to propose and discuss with me 'an agenda' for a later
meeting with Castro. I said I would await Lechuga's call."

But
President Kennedy did not see Attwood's memorandum. At the moment it arrived he
was traveling in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.

That
Friday, November 22, 1963, was much like any other day at NSA. In the early
morning hours, Cuban intercepts from the ferret ship USNS
Muller
had
ricocheted off the moon and down to NSA. The backlogged Cuban analysts and
cryptologists of B Group were only now putting out translations of messages
intercepted weeks earlier. One of those was a report by a Cuban official on the
country's internal problems with rebels. "I believe that the approaching
Presidential elections in the United States will strengthen reactionary forces
from within and without," said the worried official. "Therefore,
there is a need for a strong gorilla
[sic]
collar around Cuba."

In the
courtyard in front of the main building, a powerful yellow steam shovel was
scooping up tons of dirt for the large basement of the new nine-story,
511,000-square-foot headquarters tower as the agency continued to expand. Other
heavy equipment was clearing dense woodlands for more than 1,200 new parking
spaces.

In Room
1W040, the cover for the next edition for the
NSA Newsletter
was being
laid out. It was a drawing of Santa Glaus jumping out of a fireplace, with the
headline "Sixth NSA Annual Family Christmas Program, Dec. 8, 2:00
PM." A line of employees, getting ready for the weekend, was forming at
the NSA Federal Credit Union, which had grown to 5,647 members. At 11:30 A.M.,
in Room 1W128, the NSA Sun, Snow and Surf Club was holding its second annual
Ski Fashion Show. As part of the show, the main lobby of the Operations
Building contained a large display of the latest skis, boots, and other
equipment. Later that night, the NSA Drama Club was scheduled to present the
rueful comedy
The Pleasure of His Company
at the Fort Meade Service
Club.

That
Friday was slow in the NSA Sigint Command Center. The duty officer logged some
messages in; Sergeant Holtz arrived at ten o'clock to pick up a few tapes; at
1:30 P.M. a Strategic Air Command surveillance mission codenamed Brass Knob
sent a preflight message. Five minutes later, couriers assigned to secretly
collect cables from Western Union and the other communications companies over
the weekend were briefed.

Then, at
1:36, a bulletin flashed over the radio. Don Gardiner of the ABC radio network
cut into a local program to report that President Kennedy had been shot in
Dallas. NSA Director Gordon Blake was sitting at his desk in his third-floor
office when he heard the news. At the White House, crowded around a large
circular table in the West Basement's staff mess, the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board was deep in debate following a late lunch. Across
the Potomac, General Maxwell Taylor and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were meeting
in the Pentagon's Gold Room with the commanders of the West German Bundeswehr.
Down the hall in his E-Ring office, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was
discussing the $50 billion budget with a half-dozen aides.

At the
CIA, Director John McCone was finishing lunch with a small group of fellow
spies in his private dining room. His deputy, Marshall Carter, was quail
shooting at the Farm, the secret CIA training facility on the York River near
Williamsburg, Virginia. "When this monstrously terrible thing
happened," Carter wrote several days later, "we returned at once. . .
. He was a great and good and totally dedicated, totally selfless man—our
national blessing is that President Johnson is too."

At
fourteen minutes past two, General Blake sent out a message alerting all NSA
stations and listening posts. Twenty-two minutes later he sent out another
message over NSA's restricted communications links. "President Kennedy is
dead." At the eavesdropping base at Kamiseya in Japan, the operations
center suddenly went quiet. George Morton stopped what he was doing.
"Thousands upon thousands of miles away," he later said,
"someone had shot my commander-in-chief. I could not believe it. Neither
could anyone else." In South Africa, NSA's spy ship the USNS
Valdez
was
docked in Capetown. One of the crewmembers, Dave Ball, who had once served as a
cook for President Kennedy, held a moving memorial service.

As the
world mourned, NSA continued to eavesdrop. Immediately after the assassination,
NSA initiated a large-scale manual and computer review of all available signals
intelligence information, including all traffic between the United States and
Cuba. At the time, NSA was intercepting about 1,000 messages a day worldwide.
Suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's name was entered into the computer
search. A short time later, additional names provided by the FBI from Oswald's
address book were added. At the same time, between twenty-five and fifty
analysts manually reviewed all traffic between Cuba and New Orleans and Cuba
and Dallas, and some traffic between Cuba and Russia.

Fifteen
hundred miles to the south, Navy intercept operators, monitoring both Cuban and
"Soviet Forces Cuba" communications, listened in as Cuban military
forces were placed on high alert. "A state of alert is ordered for all
personnel," said the intercepted message. "Be ready to repel
aggression." A message intercepted from the Polish embassy in Havana
indicated that "military units are being relocated" and a new
military draft was called. Intercepts flooded in from other listening posts.
Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia also suddenly went on alert. One foreign
ambassador in Havana cabled home a report of a large movement of troops, adding
a note about Castro: "I got the immediate impression that on this occasion
he was frightened, if not terrified."