Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (23 page)

From early
intercepts of Cuban diplomatic communications, it was clear that, far from
being involved, Castro's people were as mystified by the assassination as the
rest of the world. "The assassination of Kennedy," said one message
from Havana to its embassy in Mexico City, "was a provocation against
world peace, perfectly and thoroughly planned by the most reactionary sectors
of the United States." An intercept of a message from Brazil's ambassador
to Cuba back to his Foreign Office indicated that Cuban officials "were
unanimous in believing that any other president would be 'even worse' "
than Kennedy.

Many of
the intercepts to and from foreign embassies in Washington were acquired as a
result of secret agreements between NSA and the major U.S. telecommunications
companies, such as Western Union. Under the NSA program codenamed Shamrock, the
companies agreed to illegally hand over to NSA couriers, on a daily basis,
copies of all the cables sent to, from or through the U.S. This was the
preferred method of communications for most of the foreign diplomatic
establishments in Washington and New York. Highly secret messages were sent the
same way, but written in code or cipher. The NSA's Vint Hill Farms Station eavesdropped
on those diplomatic facilities that used their own high-frequency equipment to
communicate. Still other intercepts flowed into NSA from the agency's worldwide
listening posts.

In the
hours and days following the assassination, a wide variety of intercepts poured
into NSA. The diplomatic wires were heavy with speculation about America's
future and details concerning preparations for the funeral. Shortly after the
assassination, NSA intercepted a message between Chile's ambassador to
Washington and his Foreign Ministry in Santiago. "In diplomatic
circles," he noted, "it is believed that, in the absence of other
Democratic figures of the first rank who could aspire to the presidency in the
November 1964 election, the present Attorney General becomes, with the death of
President Kennedy, the first choice to succeed him for the presidential term
which will begin in January 1965." He added, "News has just arrived
that at 1438 [2:38 P.M.] (Eastern time) Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office
as President of the United States before a federal district judge."

Egyptian
diplomats speculated that Kennedy was assassinated as a result of his stand on
racial equality. Dutch intercepts showed uncertainty over whether foreign
ambassadors would be invited to the funeral. The Argentine ambassador told
Buenos Aires that the assassination "will considerably weaken in the next
few months the international policy of the West, particularly with regard to
the USSR." He then said, for NSA, the worst words imaginable. "I shall
continue to report via air mail." A listening post eavesdropping on
Turkish diplomatic communications picked up a comment by the American
ambassador to Turkey fixing blame for the murder. "After signing the
register which is open in the American Embassy [in Ankara] on the occasion of
the death of Kennedy, I saw the [American] Ambassador. He is of the opinion
that Russia and Cuba had a finger in the assassination."

The United
Nations was also an important target for NSA. In a message transmitted back to
the Middle East, a delegation of Palestinians blamed the assassination on a
Jewish plot: "Behind the mysterious crime is a carefully plotted Zionist
conspiracy. The late President was likely to win the coming presidency
elections without supplicating the Zionist sympathy or seeking the Jews
[sic]
vote. Aware of the fact that their influence and power in the United States
are based upon the Jews vote, the Zionists murdered the courageous President
who was about to destroy that legend of theirs. His assassination is a warning
to the rest of the honorable leaders. Reveal their conspiracy to the supreme
judgement of the world. Be careful, you are the hope of the Palestinians."
Likewise, the Italian ambassador to Syria cabled Rome saying that the
government in Damascus saw Zionism behind the murder.

A diplomat
in Leopoldville, in Congo, reported: "Certain ill-intentioned persons are
rejoicing over the death of the President of the United States of America,
considering that grievous event a sign of victory for them." The Argentine
ambassador to Budapest reported that the Hungarian people "were deeply
touched," and that the government attributed the killing to "fascist
elements inspired by racial hatred." The Polish ambassador to the United Nations
expressed his concern to Warsaw over the "alarming . . . anti-Communist
hysteria that has been turned on."

The day
after the assassination, intercept operators picked up a statement by Castro:
"In spite of the antagonism existing between the Government of the United
States and the Cuban Revolution, we have received the news of the tragic death
of President Kennedy with deep sorrow. All civilized men always grieve about
such events as this. Our delegation to the Organization of the United Nations
wishes to state that this is the feeling of the people and of the Government of
Cuba." This was a generous statement, considering that Kennedy had spent
the past two years waging a secret war against him and that CIA agents had
plotted his murder.

In the
aftermath of the assassination, Meredith K. Gardner, one of NSA's top Soviet
codebreakers, was assigned to examine a number of items taken from assassin Lee
Harvey Oswald and suspected to contain codes or ciphers. The Warren Commission,
charged with investigating the assassination, was particularly intrigued by a
Russian novel,
Glaza Kotorye Sprashivayut
("Questioning
Eyes"). Oswald had apparently cut eight letters out of page 152. But this
was too little to go on. "The manner of perforating only a few
letters," wrote Gardner, "does not conform to any known system. . . .
We believe, nevertheless, that it is most likely that the letters were cut out
for some purpose related to Oswald's photographic experiments."

Oswald's
Soviet-made portable radio receiver was also examined, "with negative
results." Also, wrote Gardner in his internal NSA report, "the names
appearing in Lee's and [his wife] Marina's address books have been checked
against NSA files but no Comint references have been discovered. ... In
addition to the information on the addresses developed in the personality
check, a separate study of NSA address files is being made. While this study is
not yet complete, results have so far been negative and there is no reason to
expect that anything beyond what the personality check has already turned up
will be discovered."

Finally,
Gardner noted, "The appearance of the term 'micro dots' on page 44 of Lee
Oswald's address book aroused our suspicions, particularly in that it was
associated with the address of the photographic firm where he was once
employed."

The
mention of NSA's Comint files and the possibility of microdots became a
sensitive issue within NSA. Frank Rowlett, special assistant to Director Blake,
hid any reference to them from the final report sent to the Warren Commission.
In a memorandum to Deputy Director Tordella, Rowlett wrote, "I have
eliminated two items from the original Memorandum for the Record. . . . These
are the references to 'micro dots' . . . and the Comint reference." He
added, "I suggest that you informally (possibly by telephone) call the
Commission's attention to the appearance of the term 'micro dot' on page 44 of
Oswald's address book. You might indicate that this reference aroused our
suspicion but that we do not feel competent to make an exhaustive examination
of the materials for the presence of micro dots—such an examination should be
conducted by the FBI or CIA. If micro dots are actually found, we would be
happy to collaborate to the fullest degree required in the analysis of these
dots."

Rowlett
was also worried about letting the commission know of NSA's highly secret
communications intelligence data base. "I do not believe a statement that
we have checked the names against the NSA files needs to be made since ... it
identifies the existence of sensitive Comint records." Tordella agreed,
and the sanitized report was sent to the commission.

Shortly
after the assassination, Lisa Howard told Attwood that she had been contacted
by Dr. Lechuga. Lechuga said that he had received a letter from Castro
authorizing him to have the discussion with Attwood earlier requested by
Kennedy. Howard passed the message on to Attwood, who later that day met with
Lechuga for the first time. After expressing his condolences, Lechuga confirmed
that he had been authorized to begin preliminary talks with him; however, he
made no mention of the letter from Castro. Then, in light of the assassination,
Lechuga inquired as to how things now stood. Attwood said he would have to let
him know.

Gordon
Chase of the National Security Council later discussed the matter in a
memorandum to Bundy. "The ball is in our court," he wrote. "Bill
owes Lechuga a call. What to do? Bill thinks that we have nothing to lose in
listening to what Castro has to say; there is no commitment on our side. Also,
it would be very interesting to know what is in the letter. I am also dying to
know what's in the letter and two weeks ago I would not have hesitated. But
things are different now, particularly with this Oswald business. At a minimum,
such a talk would really have to be a non-event. I, for one, would want to
think this one over carefully. . . . They also agreed, that from this point on,
there was no further need to use Lisa Howard as an intermediary."

"I
assume you will want to brief the President," Chase wrote in another
memorandum to Bundy. It now seemed a million years since Kennedy had given his
okay to the peace feeler. Chase was convinced that any hope for normalization
had died with the late president. "The events of November 22 would appear
to make accommodation with Castro an even more doubtful issue than it
was," he said. "While I think that President Kennedy could have
accommodated with Castro and gotten away with it with a minimum of domestic
heat, I'm not sure about President Johnson. For one thing, a new President who
has no background of being successfully nasty to Castro and the Communists
(e.g. President Kennedy in October, 1962) would probably run a greater risk of
being accused, by the American people, of 'going soft.' "

The
Cubans, too, knew that the moment Kennedy died, so did any chance of
reestablishing normal relations with the United States. "Lechuga,"
Attwood wrote Chase, "and the Cubans in general, probably feel that the
situation has changed since President Kennedy's assassination. Deep down, they
probably don't expect anything hopeful from us." If contacts were to
continue, Attwood said, he wanted to call Lechuga within a couple of weeks;
otherwise, the matter "would lose momentum and wither on the vine."

But Lyndon
Johnson had no interest in accommodation. Instead, he moved the entire issue of
Cuba back to square one. In a memorandum following his first meeting with the
new president, CIA Director John McCone noted, "He asked . . . how we
planned to dispose of Castro." Johnson later approved a return to the
bankrupt and ineffective policies of sabotage and covert action.

Two weeks
later, on New Year's Day, 1964, ABC News aired an exclusive interview with
Fidel Castro. Among those watching was the French ambassador to Washington. On
January 3, he wired a summary

of the
interview back to Paris: "Until the tragic death of President Kennedy, he
[Castro] thought that the normalization of Cuban relations with the American
administration was possible. . . . He appeared 'full of hope' as to the future
of his relations with President Johnson." The message was intercepted by
NSA and passed on to the White House.

BJIWUT, MQLVGTAUZ OGJM HQPG
DWJIGTA PUBGM QZBU OJWW UH HJXG XGYWINPIX UGXKPIY PINWGWMN KPNA OBXIM NJ XUJON
UJBBXG DTUDUAGM WGNOAWJBQUZ YUCWM AOCB MUYZ TGLILWQZN LUXDJZI BVOI ZFGI UV CA
RAJVUGFUGRJ IAFM BVO WVMWV'Z DFO CPZGRAZZ KTBSFD EKRTTVE CZICGZI FT JGKI KGER
KZBSKR FRME DIGZ

As Nate
Gerson's plane approached Churchill, a windy, desolate icebox on the western shore
of Canada's Hudson Bay, he may have looked out and had the same thought as
another visitor: "Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles." In
1957, NSA asked the physicist to find a way to capture valuable but elusive
Soviet whispers as they drifted over the North Pole and into Canada. For a
number of years, Canada had maintained a bizarre listening post near
Churchill—a ship on stilts. Like a steel ark, it sat high above a sea of giant
rhombic eavesdropping antennas planted in the tundra and pointing in every
direction.

But rather
than listening to Soviet bomber pilots, Gerson and an NSA colleague ended up
spending two days and nights in the wardroom of the landed ship playing liar's
dice with the intercept operators. As a result of unique atmospheric
conditions, no signals of any type could get through. They had been absorbed
like a sponge by the auroral sky. Gerson knew that the only way to get around
the problem was to move farther north—way north—as close to Russia as they
could get. His idea was to build a listening post north of all human habitation
on the planet, on a speck of land less than five hundred miles from the North
Pole: Alert. Like a beacon, it sits on the northern tip of desolate Ellesmere,
an Arctic island nearly the size of England and Scotland combined but with a
population of less than a hundred permanent residents. It was hell in reverse,
a place of six-month nights where marrow freezes in the bone. The nearest tree
is more than fifteen hundred miles south.

Unknown,
even today, is the spy war that raged at the top of the world—the true Cold
War. Here, the two superpowers came closest together—and were even joined,
during the bitter winter, when America's Little Diomede Island and Russia's Big
Diomede Island were linked by an ice bridge. It was also each nation's
Achilles' heel, where the distances were too great and the living conditions
too intolerable to maintain an effective manned defense. "Study your
globe," warned General Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, the former chief of the Army
Air Force, "and you will see the most direct routes [between the United
States and Russia] are not across the Atlantic or Pacific, but through the
Arctic." If a third world war were to break out, Arnold cautioned,
"its strategic center will be the North Pole." The Arctic was also
the perfect place for both sides to engage in a wizard war of electronic
eavesdropping.

During the
late 1950s and the 1960s, both superpowers secretly used drifting ice islands
for espionage. Born of ancient glaciers, the barren wastelands are made of
freshwater and can be 150 feet thick or more. They drift slowly in long,
circular patterns close to the North Pole. Teams of scientists and intelligence
officers would be placed on the dangerous ice floes for up to a year at a time.
As the floe migrated through the Arctic Sea, like a ghost ship adrift and lost,
the polar spies used advanced acoustical equipment to detect hostile subs,
while special antennas and receivers eavesdropped on the other side.

It was a
perilous way to spy. On September 23, 1958, Air Force Captain James F. Smith,
an intelligence officer, Russian linguist, and Arctic survival expert, stepped
from a small plane onto Drifting Station Alpha. Alpha was a barren oval chunk
of floating drift ice less than a mile long, a hundred or so miles from the
North Pole. It was home to nineteen other scientists and technicians. Smith had
been assigned to command the outpost for the next year, but within weeks of his
arrival conditions turned severe. A punishing Arctic storm with fierce winds
and brutal currents threatened to break up the portion of the ice island where
most of the structures and equipment were located. Wood buildings had to be
moved to a safer location; some tore apart and were lost in the process.

A second
storm followed a week later, causing nearly a third of the ice floe to break
away—and then came still another storm, this one "with particularly
vicious winds," noted Smith. It closed the improvised runway, pushing it
farther from the camp and covering it with waist-high drifts of rock-hard snow.
Despite the continuous night, sleeping was sometimes difficult because of the
Arctic Sea's unearthly chant.

"Standing
at the edge of the camp floe," Smith wrote, "one could hear the soft
rumbling and feel vibrations, occasionally punctuated by sharp cracks, grinding
and crashes as large pieces were forced up, broke and tumbled."

With great
difficulty, the runway was reopened. Smith recommended the evacuation of half
the staff until conditions stabilized. Two rescue missions were launched but
had to turn back because of severe weather. Then yet another storm struck, the
fourth in less than six weeks. Sharp cracks with sawtooth edges like pinking
shears zigzagged across the ice and extended into the camp. Forty percent of the
micro-island broke away, and the runway was severed. In the oily darkness of
the Arctic night, one of the men turned a flashlight to the gaping crevasse and
exclaimed, "Ten feet wide and ten thousand feet deep."

Nevertheless,
the team was able to convert one section of the runway into a useable landing
strip. With a warning that another major storm was due within twenty-four
hours, Smith finally had some luck. He was notified that a C-123 aircraft from
Thule, Greenland, would arrive shortly. Quickly abandoning all they could not
carry, the team rushed to the landing strip. Minutes later the plane touched
down, sending a white cloud into the black sky. Then, almost immediately, it
was airborne once again, loaded with the twenty men and their few belongings. Drifting
Station Alpha, and all its equipment, was abandoned to the ruthless, grinding
polar sea.

But the
advantages of spying from the ice cap were irresistible. A permanent listening
post at Alert, Nate Gerson concluded, would allow the United States and Canada
to eavesdrop on Soviet signals obtainable only near the North Pole.
"Reception at the polar cap site of Alert," he said, "would
avoid the large number of auroral absorption events found at Churchill. It
would also permit the West to gain knowledge that the Soviets already had
obtained from observations at their periodic experimental sites on the Arctic
Ocean ice pack." Canada's equivalent of the NSA, then known as the
Communications Branch of the National Research Council (CBNRC), ran the operation.
"Don McLeish [of the CBNRC] later told me," said Gerson, " 'We
do not acknowledge the existence of CBNRC.' NSA had the same philosophy."

Once the
listening post was established, said Gerson, "we considered the
possibility of intercepting Soviet signals between thirty and fifty megahertz
at Alert via auroral E ionization. We instituted a test similar to what the
Soviets had done on their ice floe station, which recorded at Alert instances
when signals in this frequency band could be received."

Then, as
now, Alert is the "most northern permanently inhabited settlement in the
world," according to a booklet issued to employees at the listening post.
In the early 1960s, it employed about a hundred people. Ten years later the
number had doubled, and in the early 1990s Alert's population was about 180. On
a mantle of ice more than half a mile thick, the human population of Ellesmere
Island is dwarfed by herds of musk oxen—children of the ice age—and snow-white
wolves. Robert E. Peary used the island as a base for his 1909 expedition to
the North Pole.

Since it
was first established in the late 1950s, Alert has been Canada's most important
listening post for eavesdropping on Russia. China is also a target. Yet it is
so far north that it is unable to communicate with Ottawa using satellites in
stationary orbits over the equator. A relay station farther south is required,
in Eureka on Ellesmere Island. Until a recent upgrade in communications, it was
necessary to fly all the intercept tapes to Ottawa on weekly flights by
Hercules aircraft.

According
to Gerson, one of the NSA's pioneers in signals intelligence from space, at one
point Russian and Canadian eavesdroppers nearly came eye to eye when a Soviet
ice station drifted almost into Canadian territorial waters near Alert.
Communications to and from these stations were a target of the listening post.
In fact, intelligence interest was so great in the Russian floating espionage
platforms that a highly secret and extremely dangerous operation was conducted
in an attempt to find out just how sophisticated the icy spy bases were.

On April
27, 1959, the Soviets set up a base on a 4½ -mile-long ice floe about halfway
between Russia's Wrangel Island, near western Alaska, and the North Pole. Named
North Pole 8, for three years the station drifted slowly with the current,
creeping northward toward the pole at about two miles a day. On the remote
floating island, reminders were everywhere of the place they had left behind,
from large wall posters in the mess hall showing workers honoring Lenin, to
pictures of pinup girls hanging in the sleeping quarters. In free moments,
technicians would occasionally prop themselves on the edge of the ice dressed
only in swim trunks for a picture to take back home.

Like
America's Drifting Station Alpha, North Pole 8 was a troublesome hunk of ice.
Twice it was necessary to relocate the entire camp because of jagged cracks
that cut across the runway. In the winter of 1962, ravaging storms forced the
station's commander, I. P. Romanov, to order an emergency evacuation. As
powerful pressure ridges threatened to turn the island into ice cubes,
crewmembers rushed for the rescue aircraft, leaving behind uneaten food still
on the dinner table and a wide assortment of equipment. Light planes had been
used because of the damaged runway. On March 19, 1962, after 1,055 days of
continuous occupation, the station was finally abandoned.

For nearly
a year, since 1961, Leonard A. LeSchack, a lieutenant (junior grade) in the
Office of Naval Research (ONR), had been working on a highly secret project
aimed at discovering just what kind of spy equipment the Russians used on their
ice stations. Now, with the abandonment of North Pole 8, he had found his
perfect island. The son of Russian immigrants, LeSchack had turned twenty-seven
less than two weeks earlier. He had studied geology in college and soon after
graduation was chosen to take part in an exploration of Antarctica as part of
the International Geophysical Year. In search of more adventure, LeSchack
signed up for Naval Officers' Candidate School and after receiving his gold
bars talked his way into an assignment on an ice island. Later, while assigned
to ONR in Washington, he learned about the Russian abandonment of North Pole 8.

LeSchack
knew that getting onto the deserted island with its damaged runway was not that
difficult. The two-man inspection team could simply parachute in. The problem
was getting them out: the station had no runway, it was too far for helicopter
assistance, and it was too iced in for ships. But the junior officer had an
idea: a low-flying plane could snatch the men out. LeSchack knew that a method
had been developed for extracting clandestine CIA agents from denied territory
such as China. The system was a modification of a technique used for the
airborne pickup of mail pouches. The mail sack would be attached to a transfer
wire strung between two poles. The plane would fly low and slow over the long
transfer wire and a hook would grab hold of it. Crewmembers would then reel in
the mailbag.

The system
had been developed by Robert Edison Fulton, Jr., a professional inventor, and
LeSchack asked him to modify it for use on his project. It was simple yet
finely tuned. The person to be retrieved wore a harness connected to a long
nylon lift line. A weather balloon would then raise the lift line five hundred
feet. The retrieval aircraft would fly at the line and snag it in a V-shaped
yoke attached to the nose. The weather balloon would release and the plane
would gradually pull the person upward; his or her body would assume a position
parallel to the ground. A winch would then be used to pull him through a hatch
in the plane. Experiments, first with sandbags, then with sheep and pigs, and
finally with a human, proved the device worked.

Armed with
the Fulton Skyhook, LeSchack won approval for Operation Coldfeet. To get the
men covertly to and from the Russian ice island, LeSchack turned to the CIA.
The agency authorized the use of its secret proprietary airline, Intermountain
Aviation, based at Marana Air Park north of Tucson, Arizona.

In late
May 1962, as the long clutch of winter gave way to above-zero temperatures, the
team gathered at Barrow, on the northern tip of Alaska. After several days of
searching, the ragged, abandoned Soviet ice base was located. LeSchack and his
partner, Air Force Captain James F. Smith, the intelligence officer and Russian
linguist who had survived a harrowing several months on Drift Station Alpha,
boarded the CIA's B-17 for the long flight to North Pole 8. More than six hours
later, in the twenty-four-hour daylight, the plane reached the vicinity of the
island. The plane's pilot, Connie M. Seigrist, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs,
was astonished. "It was the most desolate, inhospitable-looking, and
uninviting place I had ever seen," he recalled.