Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (32 page)

On June 5,
1967, at 7:45
a.m.
Sinai time
(1:45 A.M. in Washington, D.C.), Israel launched virtually its entire air force
against Egyptian airfields, destroying, within eighty minutes, the majority of
Egypt's air power. On the ground, tanks pushed out in three directions across
the Sinai toward the Suez Canal. Fighting was also initiated along the
Jordanian and Syrian borders. Simultaneously, Israeli officials put out false
reports to the press saying that Egypt had launched a major attack against them
and that they were defending themselves.

In
Washington, June 4 had been a balmy Sunday. President Johnson's national
security adviser, Walt Rostow, even stayed home from the office and turned off
his bedroom light at 11:00 P.M. But he turned it back on at 2:50 A.M. when the
phone rang, a little over an hour after Israel launched its attack. "We
have an FBIS [Foreign Broadcast Information Service] report that the UAR has
launched an attack on Israel," said a husky male voice from the White
House Situation Room. "Go to your intelligence sources and call me
back," barked Rostow. Ten minutes later, presumably after checking with
NSA and other agencies, the aide called back and confirmed the press story.
"Okay, I'm coming in," Rostow said, and then asked for a White House
car to pick him up.

As the
black Mercury quickly maneuvered through Washington's empty streets, Rostow
ticked off in his mind the order in which he needed answers. At the top of the
list was discovering exactly how the war had started. A few notches down was
deciding when to wake the president.

The car
pulled into the Pennsylvania Avenue gate at 3:25 and Rostow was quickly on the
phone with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was still at home. "I assume
you've received the Flash," he said. They agreed that, if the facts were
as grim as reported, Johnson should be awakened in about an hour. Intelligence
reports quickly began arriving indicating that a number of Arab airfields
appeared to be inoperative and the Israelis were pushing hard and fast against
the Egyptian air force.

Sitting at
the mahogany conference table in the Situation Room, a map of Vietnam on the
wall, Rostow picked up a phone. "I want to get through to the
President," he said. "I wish him to be awakened." Three stories
above, Lyndon Johnson picked up the phone next to his carved wood bedstead.
"Yes," he said.

"Mr.
President, I have the following to report." Rostow got right to business.
"We have information that Israel and the UAR are at war." For the
next seven minutes, the national security adviser gave Johnson the shorthand
version of what the United States then knew.

About the
same time in Tel Aviv, Foreign Minister Abba Eban summoned U.S. Ambassador
Walworth Barbour to a meeting in his office. Building an ever larger curtain of
lies around Israel's true activities and intentions, Eban accused Egypt of
starting the war. Barbour quickly sent a secret Flash message back to
Washington. "Early this morning," he quoted Eban, "Israelis
observed Egyptian units moving in large numbers toward Israel and in fact
considerable force penetrated Israeli territory and clashed with Israeli ground
forces. Consequently, GOI [Government of Israel] gave order to attack."
Eban told Barbour that his government intended to protest Egypt's action to the
UN Security Council. "Israel is [the] victim of Nasser's aggression,"
he said.

Eban then
went on to lie about Israel's goals, which all along had been to capture as
much territory as possible. "GOI has no rpt [repeat] no intention taking
advantage of situation to enlarge its territory. That hopes peace can be
restored within present boundaries." Finally, after half an hour of
deception, Eban brazenly asked the United States to go up against the USSR on
Israel's behalf. Israel, Barbour reported, "asks our help in restraining
any Soviet initiative." The message was received at the White House at two
minutes before six in the morning.

About two
hours later, in a windowless office next to the War Room in the Pentagon, a
bell rang five or six times, bringing everyone to quick attention. A bulky gray
Russian Teletype suddenly sprang to life and keys began pounding out rows of
Cyrillic letters at sixty-six words a minute onto a long white roll of paper.
For the first time, an actual on-line encrypted message was stuttering off the
Moscow-to-Washington hot line. As it was printing, a "presidential
translator"—a
military officer expert in Russian—stood over the
machine and dictated a simultaneous rough translation to a Teletype operator.
He in turn sent the message to the State Department, where another translator
joined in working on a translation on which both U.S. experts agreed.

The
machine was linked to similar equipment in a room in the Kremlin, not far from
the office of the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. Known
formally as the Washington—Moscow Emergency Communications Link (and in Moscow
as the Molink), the hot line was activated at 6:50 P.M. on August 30, 1963,
largely as a result of the Cuban missile crisis.

The
message that June morning in 1967 was from Premier Alexei Kosygin. The Pentagon
and State Department translators agreed on the translation:

Dear Mr. President,

Having received information
concerning the military clashes between Israel and the United Arab Republic,
the Soviet Government is convinced that the duty of all great powers is to
secure the immediate cessation of the military conflict.

The Soviet
Government has acted and will act in this direction. We hope that the
Government of the United States will also act in the same manner and will exert
appropriate influence on the Government of Israel particularly since you have
all opportunities of doing so. This is required in the highest interest of
peace.

Respectfully,
A. Kosygin

Once the
presidential translator finished the translation, he rushed it over to the
general in charge of the War Room, who immediately called Secretary of Defense
Robert S. McNamara several floors above. McNamara had arrived in his office
about an hour earlier. "Premier Kosygin is on the hot line and asks to
speak to the president," the War Room general barked. "What should I
tell him?"

"Why
are you calling me?" McNamara asked.

"Because
the hot line ends in the Pentagon," the general huffed. (McNamara later
admitted that he had had no idea that the connection ended a short distance
away from him.) "Patch the circuit over to the White House Situation Room,
and I'll call the president," McNamara ordered.

McNamara,
not having been in on the early morning White House calls, assumed Johnson
would still be sleeping, but he put the call through anyway. A sergeant posted
outside the presidential bedroom picked up the phone. "The president is
asleep and doesn't like to be awakened," he told the Pentagon chief, not
realizing that Johnson had been awake since 4:30 A.M. discussing the crisis.
"I know that, but wake him up," McNamara insisted.

"Mr.
President," McNamara said, "the hot line is up and Kosygin wants to
speak to you. What should we say?"

"My
God," Johnson replied, apparently perplexed, "what should we
say?" McNamara offered an idea: "I suggest I tell him you will be in
the Situation Room in fifteen minutes. In the meantime, I'll call Dean and
we'll meet you there." Within half an hour, an American-supplied Teletype
was cranking out English letters in the Kremlin. Johnson told Kosygin that the
United States did not intend to intervene in the conflict. About a dozen more
hot-line messages followed over the next few weeks.

As the
first shots of the war were being fired across the desert wasteland, NSA had a
box seat. A fat Air Force C-130 airborne listening post was over the eastern
Mediterranean flying a figure-eight pattern off Israel and Egypt. Later the
plane landed back at its base, the Greek air force section of Athens
International Airport, with nearly complete coverage of the first hours of the
war.

From the
plane, the intercept tapes were rushed to the processing center, designated
USA-512J by NSA. Set up the year before by the U.S. Air Force Security Service,
NSA's air arm, it was to process intercepts— analyzing the data and attacking
lower-level ciphers—produced by Air Force eavesdropping missions throughout the
Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East. Unfortunately, they were not
able to listen to the tapes of the war immediately because they had no Hebrew
linguists. However, an NSA Hebrew linguist support team was at that moment
winging its way to Athens. (To hide their mission and avoid the implication of
spying on Israel, Hebrew linguists were always referred to as "special
Arabic" linguists, even within NSA.)

Soon after
the first CRITIC message arrived at NSA, an emergency notification was sent to
the U.S. Navy's listening post at Rota. The base was the Navy's major launching
site for airborne eavesdropping missions over the Mediterranean area. There the
Navy's airborne Sigint unit, VQ-2, operated large four-engine aircraft that
resembled the civilian passenger plane known as the Constellation, an aircraft
with graceful, curving lines and a large three-section tail. Nicknamed the
Willy Victor, the EC-121M was slow, lumbering, and ideal for
eavesdropping—capable of long, twelve- to eighteen-hour missions, depending on
such factors as weather, fuel, altitude, intercept activity, and crew fatigue.

Within
several hours of the tasking message, the EC-121 was airborne en route to
Athens, from where the missions would be staged. A few days before, a temporary
Navy signals intelligence processing center had been secretly set up at the
Athens airport near the larger U.S. Air Force Sigint facility. There,
intercepts from the missions were to be analyzed and the ciphers attacked.

After
landing, the intercept operators were bused to the Hotel Seville in Iraklion
near the Athens airport. The Seville was managed by a friendly Australian and a
Greek named Zina; the crew liked the fact that the kitchen and bar never
closed. But they had barely reached the lobby of the hotel when they received
word they were to get airborne as soon as possible. "We were in disbelief
and mystified," said one member of the crew. "Surely, our taskers did
not expect us to fly into the combat zone in the dead of the night!" That
was exactly what they expected.

A few
hours later, the EC-121 was heading east into the dark night sky. Normally the
flight took about two or three hours. Once over the eastern Mediterranean, they
would maintain a dogleg track about twenty-five to fifty miles off the Israeli
and Egyptian coasts at an altitude of between 12,000 and 18,000 feet. The
pattern would take them from an area northeast of Alexandria, Egypt, east
toward Port Said and the Sinai to the El Arish area, and then dogleg northeast
along the Israeli coast to a point west of Beirut, Lebanon. The track would
then be repeated continuously. Another signals intelligence plane, the EA3B,
could fly considerably higher, above 30,000 to 35,000 feet.

On board
the EC-121 that night was Navy Chief Petty Officer Marvin E. Nowicki, who had
the unusual qualification of being a Hebrew and Russian linguist. "I
vividly recall this night being pitch black, no stars, no moon, no
nothing," he said. "The mission commander considered the
precariousness of our flight. He thought it more prudent to avoid the usual
track. If we headed east off the coast of Egypt toward Israel, we would look,
on radar, to the Israelis like an incoming attack aircraft from Egypt. Then,
assuming the Israelis did not attack us, when we reversed course, we would then
appear on Egyptian radar like Israeli attack aircraft inbound. It, indeed, was
a very dangerous and precarious situation."

Instead,
the mission commander decided to fly between Crete and Cyprus and then head
diagonally toward El Arish in the Sinai along an established civilian air
corridor. Upon reaching a point some twenty-five miles northeast of El Arish,
he would reverse course and begin their orbit.

"When
we arrived on station after midnight, needless to say the 'pucker factor' was
high," recalled Nowicki; "the crew was on high, nervous alert. Nobody
slept in the relief bunks on that flight. The night remained pitch black. What
in the devil were we doing out here in the middle of a war zone, was a question
I asked myself several times over and over during the flight. The adrenaline
flowed."

In the
small hours of the morning, intercept activity was light. "The Israelis
were home rearming and reloading for the next day's attacks, while the Arabs
were bracing themselves for the next onslaught come daylight and contemplating
some kind of counterattack," said Nowicki. "Eerily, our Comint and
Elint positions were quiet." But that changed as the early-morning sun lit
up the battlefields. "Our receivers came alive with signals mostly from
the Israelis as they began their second day of attacks," Nowicki remembered.
Around him, Hebrew linguists were furiously "gisting"—summarizing—the
conversations between Israeli pilots, while other crew members attempted to
combine that information with signals from airborne radar obtained through
electronic intelligence.

From their
lofty perch, they eavesdropped like electronic voyeurs. The NSA recorders
whirred as the Egyptians launched an abortive air attack on an advancing
Israeli armored brigade in the northern Sinai, only to have their planes shot
out of the air by Israeli delta-wing Mirage aircraft. At one point Nowicki
listened to his first midair shootdown as an Egyptian Sukhoi-7 aircraft was
blasted from the sky. "We monitored as much as we could but soon had to
head for Athens because of low fuel," he said. "We were glad to get
the heck out of there."