Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (40 page)

The same
CIA report also made clear that after collecting intelligence on the Arab
world, spying on the United States was Israel's top priority: "The
principal targets of the Israeli intelligence and security services are: ...
(2) collection of information on secret U.S. policy or decisions, if any,
concerning Israel."

A mistake
or mass murder? It was a question Congress never bothered to address in public
hearings at the time. Among those who have long called for an in-depth
congressional investigation was Admiral Thomas Moorer, who went on to become
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Congress to this day," he
said, "has failed to hold formal hearings for the record on the
Liberty
affair. This is unprecedented and a national disgrace." Perhaps it is
not too late, especially for a Congress that rushes into lengthy hearings on
such momentous events as the firing of a few employees from a travel office in
the White House.

Throughout
its history, Israel has hidden its abominable human rights record behind pious
religious claims. Critics are regularly silenced with outrageous charges of
anti-Semitism—even many
Liberty
crew-members who managed to survive the
bloody attack and dared call for an investigation. Evidence of Israel's
deliberate killing of civilians is as recent as May 2000. The British
Broadcasting Corporation has charged that the death of one of its drivers that
month was caused by a deliberate and unprovoked strike on civilian targets
during an Israeli tank attack.

The driver
was Abed Takkoush, a news assistant for the BBC in Lebanon for twenty-five
years. Takkoush was killed on May 23, when an Israeli Merkava tank, in Israel,
fired an artillery shell across the southern Lebanon border at his blue
Mercedes. "I saw Abed lurch out of the driver's side of the car and then
fall to the ground," said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC reporter whom Takkoush had
driven to the scene. As Bowen rushed to help the driver, Israelis opened up on
him with machine-gun fire. They also fired at a Lebanese Red Cross truck as it
attempted to come to the rescue.

According
to the BBC's account, which is supported by extensive video footage from its
own camera crew and those of four other television news organizations, the
killing was totally unprovoked. "Everything was quiet," said Bowen.
There had been no gunfire, rocket attacks, or artillery exchanges during the
day as Israeli forces withdrew from southern Lebanon, which they had occupied
for more than two decades. Bowen was close enough to the border to wave at
residents of a local kibbutz across the fence. Predictably, as it did in the
case of the attack on the
Liberty,
the Israeli government claimed the
shooting was a "mistake." But the BBC was not buying that, and
instead began investigating whether Israel could be accused of a war crimes
violation under the Geneva Convention.

Even more
damningly, the BBC contends that its news film shows that the Israeli Army
"appeared to be sporadically targeting vehicles" driven by Lebanese
civilians along the same stretch of road earlier on May 23 and on May 22,
despite the absence of any "retaliatory fire from the Lebanese side of the
border."

Since the
Israeli attack on the
Liberty,
U.S. taxpayers have subsidized that
country's government to the tune of $100
billion
or more— enough to fund
NSA for the next quarter of a century. There should be no question that U.S.
investigators be allowed to pursue their probe wherever it takes them and
question whoever they need to question, regardless of borders. At the same
time, NSA should be required to make all transcripts available from the EC-121
and any other platform that eavesdropped on the eastern Mediterranean on June
8, 1967. For more than a decade, the transcripts of those conversations lay
neglected in the bottom of a desk drawer in NSA's G643 office, the Israeli
Military Section of G Group.

The time
for secrecy has long passed on the USS
Liberty
incident, in both Israel
and the United States. Based on the above evidence, there is certainly more
than enough probable cause to conduct a serious investigation into what really
happened—and why.

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Despite
the trauma of losing a ship and many of its men, neither the NSA nor the Navy
learned much; in less than a year more blood would run across gray decks, and
another seagoing listening post would be lost.

Long
before the
Liberty
was attacked, the Navy had become disenchanted with
the entire NSA oceangoing program. Navy personnel had become little more than
seagoing chauffeurs and hired hands for NSA, permitted to eavesdrop on targets
of great interest to the Navy only when doing so could not in any way interfere
with the program's primary mission of monitoring NSA's targets. To listen to
foreign naval signals, the Navy had to stick its analysts in awkward,
antenna-covered mobile vans placed aboard destroyers and destroyer escorts. But
doing so meant pulling the ships out of normal service to patrol slowly along
distant coasts, rather than taking part in fleet exercises and other
activities. It was a highly inefficient operation, combining the minimum
collection capability of a crowded steel box with the maximum costs of using a
destroyer to cart it around.

"The
Navy was very interested in having a trawler program of their own," said
Gene Sheck, formerly a deputy chief within NSA's collection organization, K
Group. Sheck managed the mobile platforms, such as the Sigint aircraft, ships,
and submarines. "The Navy position pretty clearly was that they wanted a
Navy platform controlled by Navy, responsive to Navy kinds of things." The
Navy said they needed their own fleet not just for collecting signals
intelligence, but also for a wide variety of intelligence activities. A fleet
would be useful, they said, for such things as hydrographic
intelligence—analyzing the salinity of the ocean at various locations, which
could enable better tracking of Soviet submarines.

But NSA
was not buying that. "It was totally Sigint," Sheck said. "When
they tried to tell us about all this other collection, it consisted of a rope
and a bucket, and it pulled water out of the ocean. ... I said, 'You're not
going to get away with [this] garbage. The director of NSA is going to have a
lot to say about what you do with Sigint platforms.' "

Nevertheless,
despite the NSA's serious misgivings over its loss of control, the Navy began
laying out ambitious plans for its own Sigint fleet. "We talked once . . .
about having small intelligence gathering ships . . . two hundred of
them," said one Navy admiral who was involved. Chosen as the maiden vessel
for the Navy's own spy fleet was the U.S.S.
Banner
(AGER—Auxiliary
General Environmental Research— 1), a humble little craft that had spent most
of its life bouncing from atoll to atoll in the Mariana Islands and was then on
its way back to the United States to retire in mothballs. At 906 tons and 176
feet, the twenty-one-year-old ship was a dwarf compared with the 10,680 tons
and 455 feet of the
Liberty.

Like a
short football player overcompensating for his size, the
Banner
wasted
no time in sailing into harm's way. It was assigned to the Far East, and its
first patrol, in 1965, took it within four miles of Siberia's Cape Povorotny
Bay to test the Soviets' reaction to the penetration of their twelve-mile
limit. At the time, the United States disputed the U.S.S.R.'s assertion of that
limit. As the
Banner
chugged north toward Siberia, a frigid storm began
caking ice forward and on the superstructure. Still closer, and Soviet
destroyers and patrol boats began harassment exercises, darting in and out
toward the bobbing trawler, sometimes closing to within twenty-five yards
before veering away. But as a fresh storm began brewing, the fear of capsizing
under the weight of the ice predominated, and the
Banner's
skipper,
Lieutenant Robert P. Bishop, radioed his headquarters in Yokosuka and then
swung 180 degrees back toward its base in Japan. Several hours later a reply
came through, ordering him back and warning him not to be intimidated. Bishop
obeyed and turned back into the storm, but finally gave up after progressing a
total of minus two miles over the next twenty-four hours.

During
sixteen missions over the next two years, the
Banner
became the tough
gal on the block, always looking for a fight. And on its patrols off Russia,
more often than not it found one. It had been bumped, nearly rammed, buzzed by
Soviet MiGs and helicopters, and come under threat of cannon fire. In each case,
the
Banner
managed to wiggle out of the potentially explosive situation.

Sam Tooma
was a civilian oceanographer on the ship who helped maintain the cover story.
Employed by the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office, he would take various readings
from the ocean during the missions. "We were operating twelve miles (at
least) off [the Soviet port of] Vladivostok in February," he recalled.
"The wind was blowing off the mainland at a ferocious speed. It was sort
of raining, sleeting, and God knows what else. ... I wear glasses, and they
were coated with ice, as was the rest of my face. It took forever to take a
station. I don't know how many times I thought that if Hell were the worst
place on earth, then I was in Hell. I have never been more miserable in my
whole life as when I was on the deck of the
Banner
trying to collect
oceanographic data.

"We
were constantly being harassed by the Russians," said Tooma, who would
frequently discuss with the captain what would happen if the ship were attacked
or towed into Vladivostok. "Right now there are aircraft on standby ready
to take off if they pull some fool stunt like that," he was told.
"Our aircraft would destroy the naval base, including this ship." One
March, Tooma was on the bridge when a Soviet ship began heading straight for
the
Banner.
"Some of the watch-standers started to act quite
excited and began yelling about the 'crazy Russians,'" he said. "The
captain ordered the helmsman to maintain course. According to international
rules of the road, we had the right of way. Meanwhile, the distance between
them and us was closing quite rapidly. We continued to maintain course, until I
thought that we were all doomed. At the last second, the captain ordered the
helmsman to go hard right rudder. I'm glad that he didn't wait any longer,
because all we got was a glancing blow. We had a fairly nice dent in our port
bow." Later Tooma was ordered never to mention the incident.

Codenamed
Operation Clickbeetle, the
Banner's
signals intelligence missions became
almost legendary within the spy world. The reams of intercepts sent back to
Washington exceeded expectations and NSA, now the junior partner, asked that
the scrappy spy ship try its luck against China and North Korea. The change in
assignment was agreed to and the harassment continued. The most serious
incident took place in the East China Sea off Shanghai in November 1966, when
eleven metal-hulled Chinese trawlers began closing in on the
Banner.
However,
after more than two and a half hours of harassment, Lieutenant Bishop skillfully
managed to maneuver away from the danger without accident. "There were
some touchy situations," said retired Vice Admiral Edwin B. Hooper.
"At times she was harassed by the Chinese and retired. Occasionally the
Seventh Fleet had destroyers waiting over the horizon...
Banner
was
highly successful, so successful that Washington then wanted to convert two
more. The first of these was the
Pueblo."
The second would be the
USS
Palm Beach.

A sister
ship of the
Banner,
the
Pueblo
was built in 1944 as a general-purpose
supply vessel for the U.S. Army. She saw service in the Philippines and later
in Korea, retiring from service in 1954, where she remained until summoned back
to duty on April 12, 1966. Over the next year and a half she underwent
conversion from a forgotten rust bucket into an undercover electronic spy at
the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton, Washington. She was commissioned
in May 1967.

"The
Liberty
[-size]
ships were owned by NSA pretty much and were designed and operated in
support of their operations, strictly collection for NSA," said Lieutenant
Stephen R. Harris, a Harvard graduate who was selected to run the Sigint
operation on the ship.
"Pueblo
and company were supposed to be more
tactical support to the fleet, although I don't think that ever came to be, so
we were operating in support of the Navy. However, all the data that we would
have gathered went to NSA for their more detailed analysis." Before his
assignment to the
Pueblo,
Harris was assigned to a naval unit at NSA
headquarters and also went on hazardous Sigint missions aboard submarines
cruising close to hostile shores.

Chosen to
skipper the
Pueblo
was Lloyd Mark (Pete) Bucher, a Navy commander with a
youth as rough as a provocative cruise on the
Banner.
Bounced from relative
to relative, then put out on the street at age seven, he eventually ended up in
an orphanage and, finally, at Father Flanagan's Boys Town. Then he dropped out
of high school, joined the Navy, and eventually was commissioned after
receiving his high school diploma and a degree from the University of Nebraska.
A submariner, he had always dreamed of skippering his own sub. Instead, he was
put in charge of a spy boat that spent most of its time sailing in circles.

Adding to
the insult, he discovered that a large section of his own ship was only partly
under his command. He had to share responsibility for the signals intelligence
spaces with NSA and its Naval Security Group. In these spaces, he had to first
show Harris, a junior officer, that he had a need to know before he could learn
some of the secrets held by his own ship.

In October
1967, Harris flew to Washington for briefings on the ship by NSA and the Naval
Security Group. "The location of the first mission hadn't been decided
upon," he said, "but I was sure we were going to do some productive
things. So I selected a list of countries which I thought were significant, and
went around to various offices at NSA and talked to people about them. North
Korea was on my list. I remember feeling, 'Well, we might go there.' "

Through an
agreement between the Navy and NSA, it was decided that the
Banner
and
Pueblo
"would do one patrol in response to Navy tasking and then one patrol
in response to NSA tasking," said Gene Sheck of K Group. "It was
decided that because the
Banner . . .
had completed a patrol off the
Soviet coast, that why don't you guys, Navy, you take the first patrol of the
Pueblo
and designate where you want it to go. . . . They, the Navy, determined
that the ship ought to operate off North Korea in 1967. And we, NSA, at that
particular point in time, had no problem with that." The
Pueblos
missions
would be codenamed Ichthyic, a word that means having the character of a fish.

A few
weeks later, the
Pueblo
departed the West Coast on the first leg of its
journey to Japan, where it was to join the
Banner
on signals
intelligence patrols in the Far East.

While
Harris was walking the long halls at NSA, getting briefings, reading secret
documents, and scanning maps, a man with darting eyes was walking quickly up a
sidewalk on Sixteenth Street in northwest Washington. A dozen blocks behind him
stood the North Portico of the White House. Just before reaching the University
Club, he made a quick turn through a black wrought-iron fence that protected a
gray turn-of-the-century gothic stone mansion. On the side of the door was a
gold plaque bearing the letters "CCCP"—the Russian abbreviation of
"Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

A few
minutes later, Yakof Lukashevich, a slender Soviet embassy security officer
with stiff, unruly hair, greeted the man. "I want to sell you top
secrets," the man impatiently told the Russian. "Valuable military
information. I've brought along a sample." With that, he reached into the
front pocket of his jacket and handed Lukashevich a top secret NSA keylist for
the U.S. military's worldwide KL-47 cipher machine. With it, and the right
equipment, the Russians would be able to break one of America's most secret
cipher systems. "My name is James," the man said. "James Harper."
It was the beginning of a long and profitable relationship. Within weeks Harper
would also be selling the Soviets keylists for the KW-7, a cipher system more
modern and secret than the KL-47. Over KW-7 passed some of the nation's most
valuable information.

The
afternoon was as gray as the
Pueblo's
wet bow when the ship steamed
gently into the Yokosuka Channel. Sailors in midnight-blue pea coats and white
Dixie Cup hats raced about in the frigid December wind arranging thick brown
lines and shouting instructions as the ship nudged alongside Pier 8 South at
Yokosuka Naval Base, just south of Tokyo. After nearly a year of preparation,
the
Pueblo
was now positioned for the start of its first mission.

Across the
Sea of Japan sat its target, North Korea, a mysterious volcano sending out
increasingly violent tremors after a decade of lying dormant. Starting in May,
teams of heavily armed agents began landing in rear areas of South Korea with
orders to test the guerrilla environment. Since September, trains had twice
been sabotaged. In October and November there were seven attempts to kill or
capture U.S. and South Korean personnel in or near the DMZ. Finally, several
ambushes resulted in the death of six American and seven South Korean soldiers.
Between January 1 and September 1, 1967, there had been some 360 incidents of
all types, compared with 42 for the entire previous year.