Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (25 page)

Still
other listening posts rose like desert flowers in the African sands. At Wheelus
Air Base in Libya, a thousand miles of sand surrounded American eavesdroppers
on three sides, with 500 miles of Mediterranean to the north. "Even though
we were on the coast," said an intercept operator who was assigned to the
Air Force 6934th Radio Squadron Mobile during the 1950s, "temperatures
reached 110—120 degrees when a sandstorm (or
ghiblis
as they are called)
rolled in. All air stopped blowing and you're burning up." But the desert
listening post was an excellent place to eavesdrop on Soviet high-frequency
communications. "In my time in Libya, we copied most everything out of
Russia," he said, "all the way to Vladivostok submarine pens in the
Sea of Japan."

Antennas
also sprang up where Allied bombs once fell. In Germany and Japan, dozens of
listening posts were built amid the ruins of former enemy naval and military
bases. In Berlin, the rubble from the war was bulldozed into an enormous
manmade mountain outside the center of the city, in the Teufelsberg district.
On top of that mountain, the highest point around, the Army Security Agency
built a listening post that became one of NSA's most important ears on Soviet
and East German communications throughout the Cold War. Known as Field Station,
Berlin, it held the unique distinction of twice winning NSA's prestigious
Travis Trophy for best worldwide listening post.

For
several years in the mid-1980s, intercept operators were mystified because
during the same two weeks every year they could pick up key East Bloc signals
unobtainable at any other time. Eventually they realized that those two weeks
coincided with the American cultural festival. Suddenly someone noticed the
giant Ferris wheel. "It was acting as a great big antenna," said Bill
McGowan, who was an Army captain working at the listening post. "We got
excellent reception. One year we went and asked them to leave it up for another
month."

Once the
North Sea port for the German navy's mighty fleet, Bremerhaven became another
major eavesdropping site targeting Soviet bloc ships and submarines. Aubrey
Brown, an intercept operator there, still remembers straining to hear every
sound. "You're trying to pull out just the slightest thing you can hear.
And sometimes it's very, very weak so you put these things directly over your
ear and turn the volume up as high as you can get it."

Inside the
listening post's operations building, intercept operators would work
"cases," as the larger Soviet ships—cruisers and battleships—were
known. Once a Russian signal was captured, the intercept operator would type
out the five-letter code groups on a typewriter with Cyrillic keys. "Every
operator there had an assignment and they had a particular frequency they were
listening to ... ," Brown said. "Each operator there had a particular
case they were listening to. And in Bremerhaven it was all Soviet and East
German and Polish—mostly Russian—communicating with their homeport."

Not only
did each person have his own case to work, but also three or four intercept
operators were assigned to search positions. "What they did was sit there
and continuously go through frequency after frequency, just scanned the entire
spectrum listening and copying it and looking it up in books and seeing what it
was," said Brown. "Because at times there were frequency changes and
you could catch them early if you had this kind of scanning going on. Or
sometimes there were things that went on that no one knew about and you would
find them. So the best operators in the group generally manned the search
positions."

To monitor
East German naval activity in the Baltic Sea, a listening post was built in the
tiny village of Todendorf, a name that roughly translates to "Village of
Death." Located near the northern city of Kiel, a port on the Baltic, the
fog-shrouded base was home to about 150 naval intercept operators. There the
"Merry Men of Todendorf," as they called themselves, lived in a
barracks warmed by a coal-fired stove and dined on schnitzel sandwiches and
three-egg
Bauernfruhstücke.

To better
monitor the Communists, the technicians frequently drove mobile intercept vans
and trucks to a remote stretch of Fehmarn Island in the Baltic Sea. There,
under difficult conditions, they would set up their temporary listening post.
"One would have had to experience manhandling a bulky antenna system to
the top of a two-and-a-half-ton van in freezing rain," said one of the
Merry Men. "And enduring days . . . spent warming hash, soup, or canned
spaghetti on a hot plate and trying to cook eggs in a coffee pot, napping in a
sleeping bag inside the freezing cab of the van. Or accompanying a five-ton
equipment truck while listening to the never ending roar of the portable
generator, and suffering the indignities of life without a restroom. Fresh
water was limited to what could be carried in jerry cans, the nearest toilet
was ten miles away, and showers were out of the question until the mission was
terminated and they returned to Todendorf." Later, another small listening
post, made up of vans the size of semitrailer trucks, was established at Dahme
on the German Riviera. One telemetry intercept operator described Dahme as
"a target-rich environment."

Other
listening posts in West Germany snuggled close to Soviet bloc land borders or
hung on the edge of steep cliffs.

Following
massive Warsaw Pact maneuvers in an area of Czechoslovakia that NATO considered
a major invasion corridor, the Army Security Agency quickly established a
monitoring base on a nearby West German mountain. Long white vans packed with
sensitive eavesdropping, recording, and transcribing equipment were airlifted
3,500 feet up to Eckstein, a peak on Hoher Bogen mountain in the Bavarian
forest. Elint towers, odd-shaped antennas secured in cement, warning signs, and
radomes that looked like giant Ping-Pong balls were erected. "At night,
one could see the lights of Pilsen and Prague," recalled F. Harrison
Wallace, Jr., a former Sigint specialist assigned to Eckstein. "Eckstein
was chosen because there was a clear view eastward from the top of the
cliff—twelve hundred feet straight down." Eventually the site began to
look like a parking lot for eavesdropping vans. Eckstein was home to about a
hundred personnel, including Russian and Czech linguists and a dozen traffic
analysts.

For those
assigned to such remote border listening posts, life could be very rough.
Seventy-mile-per-hour blizzard winds tore at Eckstein's small trailers and
Quonset hut and buried them in snow up to eight feet. "There was no
running water on the mountain," said Wallace. "Water for coffee, hot
chocolate, and washing had to be carried to 'the Hill' in five gallon Jerry
cans." Sanitation consisted of a single, two-hole wooden outhouse, covered
with heavy icicles in the winter, that simply sent the waste down the side of
the cliff.

Despite
the isolation of Eckstein, there were moments of excitement. "The finest
hour for Eckstein," said Wallace, "was the 'Prague Spring' of
1968," when the Soviet army brutally invaded Czechoslovakia to crush a
budding rebellion. Eckstein was able to provide NSA with minute-by-minute details
of the invasion. The remote listening post also played a key role in
eavesdropping on Soviet involvement in the Israeli-Egyptian Yom Kippur War of
1973. Communications intercepted at Eckstein indicated that the Russians were
planning to consolidate Warsaw Pact supplies in Prague before airlifting them
to Egypt.

Another
rich source of Soviet bloc communications was overflights of East Germany. To
facilitate the transportation of personnel and supplies to West Berlin, which
sat like an island in a Soviet sea, negotiators had agreed on three narrow air
corridors connecting it with West Germany. For NSA, these air corridors became
veins of gold. The twenty-mile-wide paths together covered about one-sixth of
East Germany. Masquerading as routine cargo flights through the corridors, U.S.
Air Force C-130E and C-97G aircraft packed with eavesdropping gear would
secretly monitor Communist bloc communications as they flew over the corridors.

These
missions were conducted by the secretive 7405 Support Squadron which was
located at Wiesbaden Air Base in West Germany. Operating under codenames such
as Creek Rose, Creek Stone, and Creek Flea, the squadron flew 213 signals
intelligence missions during the first half of 1967, clocking more than 915
hours in the air and snaring 5,131 intercepts. On their slow transits to and
from West Berlin, the "back-enders" operated a variety of receivers,
recorders, signal analyzers, and direction finders. Specialized NSA equipment,
a part of Project Musketeer Foxtrot, was also installed. The goal was to pinpoint
hostile radar systems and dissect their electronic pulses so that, in the event
of war, American fighters and bombers would be able to avoid, jam, or spoof
anti-aircraft weapons.

With the
ability to look deep into East German territory, intercept operators picked up
enormous amounts of intelligence on the Russian systems. NSA's Project
Musketeer Foxtrot, said one intelligence report, "provided precise
measurements of the Tall King radars. Numerous intercepts of 'unusual' Tall
King modes during this project indicated more sophisticated operation than
previously suspected." Other intercepts revealed the parameters of Soviet
Fan Song radars, used to guide surface-to-air missiles, and the exact location
of a new Fire Can radar associated with Russian 57- and 85-millimeter
anti-aircraft cannons. In June 1967, as Israel launched the Six-Day War, the
Ravens were able to detect East German missile equipment being moved close to
the West German border.

Turkey
also became prime real estate for NSA, especially because of its proximity to
Soviet missile testing areas. In 1957, a listening post was built near the
village of Karamürsel on the Sea of Marmara, about thirty-seven miles southeast
of Istanbul. Eventually, a giant elephant-cage antenna dominated the horizon.
In the outdoor cafes nearby, Turkish farmers sipped
çay
from glass cups
and inhaled bitter smoke from waterpipes and the local Yeni Harmen cigarettes.

At 9:07
A.M., on April 12, 1961, activity inside the listening post grew frenzied. At
that moment, far to the north, a giant
Vostok 1
rocket rose from its
launch pad. Sitting within the massive spacecraft was Colonel Yuri Alexeyevich
Gagarin, twenty-seven, the son of a peasant family from the rural village of
Klushino near Smolensk, and now dubbed by his fellow cosmonauts the Columbus of
the Cosmos. For the first time in history, a person was being sent into space.
But the Soviet government, out of fear of a mishap or disaster, kept the
liftoff enormously secret. Only after Gagarin had returned safely was an
announcement made. Despite the secrecy, however, intercept operators at Karamürsel
were able to monitor the liftoff and flight moment by moment, including the
conversations between Gagarin and mission control.

"We
couldn't listen [directly] to the spacecraft because it was encrypted—the
back-and-forth between [it and] the space station," said a former
intercept operator at Karamürsel. "But by satellite we would be able to
eavesdrop on their [Russian] local, unencrypted lines within the space center
and over those lines we could hear the conversations with the cosmonauts
because they would have an open speaker in the background. They would be using
a frequency that no one else was and we were able to just lock in on
that."

Among the
very few Westerners to have listened to the world's first manned space mission
as it was happening was Karamürsel intercept operator Jack Wood. "Our
mission," he said, "was the number one mission in the world—to
monitor the Russian manned space program. After nearly forty years, I still
remember the excitement of hearing Yuri Gagarin's voice over my headset. . . .
We were all tuned in for that historic moment. Loose translation: 'I see you
and hear you well, OK.' "

The flight
nearly ended in tragedy, however. As the spacecraft was about to reenter
earth's atmosphere, two parts of the vehicle failed to separate as planned and
the capsule began spinning out of control. "Malfunction!!!" Colonel
Yevgeny Karpov, Gagarin's commander, scribbled angrily in his notes at the
space center. Karpov saw disaster. "Don't panic! Emergency
situation." But after ten minutes the parts broke away, the spacecraft
steadied, and the landing was successful.

In Japan,
the dust from World War II Allied bombing attacks had barely settled when
American eavesdroppers began setting up shop. In charge of finding an ideal
location to eavesdrop on Russia, China, and North Korea was Navy Captain Wesley
Wright, a pioneer cryptologist, who was based in Tokyo as chief of NSA Pacific.
Wright remembered the tunnels at Corregidor in the Philippines and had heard of
similar tunnels in a place called Kamiseya, an area of rice paddies in the
shadow of Mount Fuji. The tunnels were used to store torpedoes for air attacks
against American ships. Wright decided that the tunnels could now be turned
against the Communists as a secret listening post. The low ambient electrical
noise in the rural area made for good reception.

At the
time, the tunnels of Kamiseya were a mess. The floors were covered in three
inches of water, and the rusty overhead rails used for moving torpedoes were
still in place. Gradually the tunnels were made livable, lighting was
installed, SP-600 high-frequency receivers were brought in, guards were
assigned, other buildings were built or restored. Dozens of rhombic antennas,
arranged in rosette patterns, were constructed to sweep in the Communist
communications. A rotating switch allowed the intercept operators to choose the
antenna that best received their target. Along the walls of the tunnel were
columns of metal racks with thick black cables snaking from the receivers.
Soon, long ribbons of seven-ply fan-fold carbon paper, covered with rows of
Russian words and code groups, were flowing from Underwood typewriters
twenty-four hours a day. More intercept positions were built in an adjacent
building. Known as the pantry, the windowless room there had cream and green
rubber tiles on the floor and globe lights above each "posit."