Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (50 page)

McNamara
knew full well how disingenuous this was. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had become
a sewer of deceit. Only two years before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, his Joint
Chiefs had presented him with a plan to launch a conspiracy far more grave than
"inducing" the attack on the destroyers. Operation Northwoods had
called for nothing less than the launch of a secret campaign of terrorism
within the United States in order to blame Castro and provoke a war with Cuba.

More than
three years after the incident in the Gulf, about the same time McNamara was
feigning indignation before the Senate committee, the Joint Chiefs were still
thinking in terms of launching "pretext" wars. Then the idea was to
send the Sigint ship
Banner,
virtually unmanned, off dangerous North
Korean shores, not to collect intelligence but to act as a sitting duck and
provoke a violent response. Once the attack occurred, it would serve as an
excuse to launch a war.

These
proposed wars would be hidden for decades from Congress and the public under
classification stamps and phony claims of national security.

George
Ball, under secretary of state when the Tonkin Gulf incident took place, later
came down on the side of the skeptics. "At the time there's no question
that many of the people who were associated with the war," he said,
"were looking for any excuse to initiate bombing. . . . The 'DeSoto'
patrols, the sending of a destroyer up the Tonkin Gulf was primarily for provocation.
... I think there was a feeling that if the destroyer got into some trouble,
that it would provide the provocation we needed." Ball had no knowledge of
Operation Northwoods.

Restless
from a decade of peace, out of touch with reality, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
were desperate for a war, any war. Thanks in large part to the provocative
Sigint patrols and NSA's intercept mix-up, now they had one.

With the
passing of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, the tidal wave that had begun as distant
whitecaps came crashing down, eventually sweeping tens of thousands of
Americans to their death.

At the
same time the war was being fought in the steamy jungles, it was also being
waged high in the ether. This was the Sigint war, an invisible battle to
capture hidden electrons and solve complex puzzles. As in World War II, it can
often be the decisive battle. But the glory days of solving the German Enigma
code and the Japanese Purple code had long since passed. With the North
Vietnamese military and the Vietcong, NSA was discovering, the old rules had
been changed. The eavesdroppers would have to start from scratch.

Hidden
from view, NSA rapidly increased its buildup in Vietnam. By 1964 the number of
cryptologic personnel in the country had reached 1,747. Three hundred men now
packed Davis Station at Tan Son Nhut in Saigon. The Navy sent a Marine Sigint
detachment to Pleiku, where they targeted Laotian and North Vietnamese
communications. And U.S. Air Force intercept operators began setting up shop in
Da Nang. To coordinate the growing numbers of units, a secure communications
network was built linking sites at Nha Trang, Can Tho, Bien Hoa, Pleiku, Da
Nang, and Ban Me Thuot. Then, in order to communicate quickly and securely with
NSA headquarters, an undersea cable was laid from Vietnam to the Philippines.
Codenamed Wetwash, the cable carried a variety of traffic ranging from
high-speed CRITIC circuits to intercepted North Vietnamese messages too
difficult to decrypt in Vietnam. In the Philippines, the Wetwash cable connected
to another secure undersea cable that eventually terminated at NSA, in Fort
Meade.

In the far
north, near the demilitarized zone separating North from South, 1,000 Sigint
personnel were sent to Phu Bai, which became the cornerstone of NSA's
expansion. Like electronic border police, intercept operators manned 100
positions in a windowless operations building, listening for indications of
infiltration and guerrilla activity. Others eavesdropped on tactical
communications by both North Vietnamese and Laotian Communist forces. The
expansive base was supported by another 500 people and surrounded by high
fences, barbed wire and concertina wire, and eleven guard posts manned
twenty-four hours a day.

But just
as the numbers of people continued to grow, so did the problems. Although the
school to train South Vietnamese soldiers was built and fully equipped, for
years it had virtually no students because of the inability of the indigenous
soldiers to pass NSA's rigorous security clearance requirements. More equipment
and personnel in the field meant more intercepts, but most of them were not
being analyzed because of the lack of trained linguists. "U.S. personnel
with the ability to read Vietnamese texts were in short supply," said one
NSA document, "and people competent to deal with spoken Vietnamese, with
very few exceptions, were not to be found." Despite a crash training
program at NSA, said the report, "the linguist problem became worse, not
better." Communications problems were also frequent.

Most
incredibly, NSA deliberately refrained from mounting a massive World War
II—style Enigma or Purple effort against North Vietnamese cipher systems.
According to one of the key NSA officials overseeing the cryptologic effort in
Vietnam, "We found that we had adequate information without having to do
that. In other words, through a combination of traffic analysis, low-level
cryptanalysis, and plaintext/clear voice. The situation didn't justify the
major effort." According to another former official, mounting an enormous
effort against North Vietnam would have diverted limited resources away from
"the Soviet problem" and other areas, which nobody wanted to do.
"And of course there was always the question of whether there was any
utility in working on one-time pads," said the former official. "But
my argument always was, How do you know it's a one-time pad if you don't work
it?" This was an allusion to the surprising "Venona"
breakthrough in Soviet onetime pads.

For most
of the intercept operators, used to the monotonous routine of peacetime
listening posts, there was an air of unreality about Vietnam. The constant
wharp-wharp-wharp
of steel helicopter blades echoing off rusty corrugated roofs. Gunships on
a hunt, flying in formation as they skimmed the ground. Open crates of green
rocket-propelled grenades and saucer-shaped claymore mines resting haphazardly
beside delicate flame trees and baskets of lotus blossoms.

The Sigint
war was fought by both sides. Although no one knew it at the time, the North
Vietnamese Central Research Directorate, which managed the North's Sigint
operations, was successfully collecting almost all South Vietnamese and U.S.
communications passing over a number of key traffic lanes. North Vietnam did
not need to break high-level American codes, because the Americans continuously
chose expediency over security. Rather than take the time to send the
information over secure, encrypted lines, they would frequently bypass
encryption and simply use voice communications. The problem became, according
to NSA, America's Achilles' heel during the war. "There was no blotter
large enough to dry up sensitive, exploitable plain-language communications in
Vietnam," said one NSA report.

Over the
years, U.S. forces would occasionally capture enemy Sigint operators who would
shed light on the problem. "Through interrogation of these men and study
of the documents and signals intelligence materials seized," said a secret
NSA analysis, "a clear, even frightening picture of Vietnamese Communist
successes against Allied communications gradually emerged." Even as late
as 1969, major clandestine listening posts were being discovered, such as one
in Binh Duong Province. "Evaluation of the equipment showed that the enemy
unit could hear virtually all voice and manual Morse communications used by
U.S. and Allied tactical units. The documents proved the enemy's success—2,000
hand-copied voice transmissions in English and signals intelligence instruction
books of a highly professional caliber."

U.S.
intelligence sources estimated that North Vietnam had probably as many as 5,000
intercept operators targeting American communications. "The inescapable
conclusion from the captured documents in U.S. hands," said the NSA
report, "is that the enemy is conducting a highly sophisticated signal
intelligence operation directed against U.S. and Allied forces in South
Vietnam. He has developed the art of intercept to the point where his operators
receive training materials tailored to the particular U.S. or Allied units against
whom they are working. The training materials captured list selected [U.S.]
units, the frequencies on which they communicated, their communications
procedures, the formats and numerous examples of their messages, and other
characteristics to guide the communist operator."

The
consequences of the poor U.S. communications security coupled with the advanced
state of North Vietnamese Sigint were serious. NSA labeled the careless
procedures "deadly transmissions." Lieutenant General Charles R.
Myer, a career signals officer who served twice in Vietnam, outlined the
problem. "The enemy might disappear from a location just before a planned
U.S. attack," he said. "B-52 bomber strikes did not produce expected
results because the enemy apparently anticipated them."

Strikes
from sea were equally vulnerable. On February 11, 1965, the aircraft carrier
USS
Hancock
was preparing to launch a bombing raid against certain shore
targets in the North. But details of the mission were discussed over
plain-language channels days before the attack. As a result, North Vietnamese
naval units were ordered to use camouflage and systematically disperse before
the morning of February 11. On other occasions, when the American planes
arrived over their targets, anti-aircraft weapons were waiting, pointing in
their direction, with deadly results.

Again in
an attempt to avoid the time-consuming task of encrypting information using
approved NSA ciphers and equipment, Americans would often make up their own
"homemade" codes. "Their continued appearance on the scene has
constituted one of the major Comsec [communications security] headaches of the
war," a Top Secret/Umbra NSA report noted. "Even as late as the
spring of 1969, the U.S. Air Force attaché in Laos, who was coordinating
semi-covert U.S. air and other operations in that country, was sending most of
his messages in a code he had made up himself." NSA's Air Force
communications security specialists secretly eavesdropped on the attaché's
communications. "They could completely reconstruct his code within eight
to ten hours after each change," said the NSA report. "Since the attaché
changed codes only every five weeks, most of his messages were susceptible to
immediate enemy Sigint exploitation. The appearance and reappearance of codes of
this type demand constant Comsec alertness."

Even if
U.S. forces did use secure encryption to pass sensitive information, such as
dates and times for attacks, problems arose when that information was passed to
the South Vietnamese military and
they
discussed it over less secure
channels. The South's communications were particularly vulnerable to the
Vietcong. For example, using captured American equipment the guerrilla force
was able to pick up U.S. Special Forces communications transmitted through the South
Vietnamese Air Force network. "It was . . . likely that they could gain
all the intelligence they needed on the growing U.S. presence in Vietnam from
[South Vietnamese Air Force] communications," said an NSA study of the
problem. One former Vietcong soldier later told U.S. officials that as a result
of Sigint his unit had never been taken by surprise over a ten-year period and
that they never had enough English-language linguists for all the
communications they intercepted.

Another
major problem was the lack of secure telephones. The Vietnam-era secure phone,
the KY-8, was far from the compact handset of today; it looked more like a
small safe. In 1965 there were 800 of the crypto machines in a warehouse in the
U.S., but they had neither mounting brackets nor connecting cables. After what
was described as "some tortuous evolutions," the first KY-8s
eventually arrived in South Vietnam late in 1965 and over the next three years
they were all distributed. An aircraft version, the KY-28, and a mobile unit,
the KY-38, were also distributed. But there were not nearly enough secure
phones. They were also very temperamental and prone to failure. Because they
broke down in direct sunlight and high heat, they were also useless in places
like bunkers. As a result, they did not solve the problem of classified talk on
unsecure phones. "Signal security, particularly in voice radio
transmissions," said General Myer, "was a major problem area
throughout the period of combat operations in Vietnam."

To help
guard against sloppy procedures and compromises, NSA and its naval, air, and
military arms conducted what was known as communications security monitoring.
"In conventional Comsec operations," said one NSA study of the
Vietnam War, "the monitor places himself in the role of the enemy.
Selectively, he intercepts the communications of his own service and then
reports on the intelligence he has—and the enemies could have—gleaned from
them." The Comsec personnel would frequently work from the back of hot,
antenna-covered, three-quarter-ton trucks. Surrounding them would be a variety
of monitoring equipment, such as the TPHZ-3, which could listen to thirty
telephone lines simultaneously. During 1967, Comsec operators eavesdropped on
6,606,539 radio-telephone conversations and more than 500,000 conventional
telephone calls.