Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (56 page)

As the
fighting continued, Rowe's unit began running out of ammunition. "Those
not swearing loudly were praying, preparing for close-in fighting. We knew if we
did not get more ammunition, it would be a one-on-one struggle for each of
us." The Sigint soldiers were ordered to hold their fire until the last
instant, to preserve ammo. "When we could wait no longer," said Rowe,
"we started to run toward the wire to meet them head on." A short
while later, six helicopter gunships came to the rescue. Nevertheless, the
ferocious battle went on for days. By the time it was over, enemy soldiers were
stacked five deep around the listening post. "The plows pushed about four
hundred dead Vietcong into a low drainage area to the right and in front of our
bunker line."

Gary
Bright, a stocky, sandy-haired Army warrant officer, woke to the ring of the
phone beside his bed in Saigon's Prince Hotel. It was 2:30 A.M. "They've
hit the embassy and palace. The airfield is under attack," said the
excited voice. "I'm going to blow the switch." The call was from a
sergeant at NSA's newly installed Automatic Secure Voice Switch at the MACV
compound on Tan Son Nhut Air Base. The switch was the key link for highly
secret phone calls between Saigon and Washington, and the sergeant was afraid
that the facility and all its crypto equipment would soon be captured. Bright,
in charge of the switch, told the soldier to get ready for a destruct order but
not to pull the plug before he arrived.

Bright
quickly threw on his tan uniform, grabbed his glasses, and ran down three
flights of stairs to his jeep. "As we got in I armed my grease gun—a
.45-caliber submachine gun—and watched the street," he said. Bright and
his partner sped down Plantation Road, the main traffic artery, toward the MACV
compound. As they rounded the traffic circle near the French racetrack they
passed another jeep with its lights on. Seconds later Bright heard a loud
explosion and turned around to see the second jeep demolished and in flames.
Then he started taking fire from the top of the racetrack wall, bullets
crashing into his vehicle. Bright swiveled around and opened fire with his
submachine gun, knocking some of the Vietcong shooters off the wall.

Upon
reaching the secure switch, Bright began to prepare for emergency destruction.
Later a call came in from the U.S. embassy. "The VC were on the first
floor," Bright said. The caller was shouting, worried that enemy forces
would soon capture the sensitive communications and crypto equipment. To make
matters worse, the embassy had no destruct devices and Bright was asked to
bring some over. "I got on the phone and told them that it was impossible
to get out, much less get downtown to them," Bright recalled. "I told
them the best thing to do was to shoot the equipment and smash the boards as
much as possible if emergency destruction became necessary."

At the
time of the attack, the
Oxford's
crew was living it up in Bangkok. The
ship would not sail back until February 1, a day after the start of the biggest
offensive of the war.

Battles
were taking place simultaneously throughout South Vietnam, from Hue in the
north to Saigon in the south. By the time the acrid cloud of gunsmoke began to
dissipate, on February 13, 4,000 American troops had been killed along with
5,000 South Vietnamese and 58,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Although the
United States eventually turned back the Tet offensive, the American public now
realized what price was being paid for a war without end.

The sole
winner to come out of Tet was NSA. Of all the intelligence agencies, it was the
only one to come up with the right warning at the right time. That the
intelligence was not acted on much sooner was the fault of Westmoreland and the
generals and politicians in Saigon and Washington who refused to pay attention
to anything that might detract from their upbeat version of the war and their
fantasy numbers. "The National Security Agency stood alone in providing the
kind of warnings the U.S. Intelligence Community was designed to provide,"
concluded a 1998 CIA review of the war, which gave only mediocre reviews to the
agency's own intelligence. "Communications intelligence often afforded a
better reading of the enemy's strength and intentions (and was better heeded by
command elements) than did agent reports, prisoner interrogations, captured
documents, or the analytic conclusions derived from them. But in Washington the
Sigint alerts apparently made little impression on senior intelligence officers
and policymakers."

Finally,
the CIA study concluded, "Senior intelligence and policy-making officers
and military leaders erred on two principal scores: for having let concern for
possible political embarrassment derail objective assessments of the enemy
order of battle, and for ignoring NSA's alerts and Saigon Station's warnings
that did not accord with their previous evaluations of probable enemy
strategy."

Pleased
with his agency's performance, Director Marshall S. Carter, on May 8, 1968,
sent a telegram to former president Harry S. Truman on his eighty-fourth
birthday. "The National Security Agency extends its heartiest
congratulations and warm wishes," he wrote. "You will recall
establishing the National Security Agency in 1952 and we will continue to
strive to accomplish the objectives you laid down for us at that time."

Back in
Washington, Lyndon Johnson was being compared in the press to General George
Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. About a month after the heavy
fighting ended, he announced he would no longer be a candidate in the upcoming
presidential election. In Vietnam, American troops suddenly began to realize
they might be fighting a losing war.

Some
soldiers who physically survived Tet nevertheless died inside. Following one
fight, an injured American soldier and two wounded Vietcong were brought to an
aid station at a firebase named Stephanie. After attempting, unsuccessfully, to
save the U.S. soldier, an Army medic went off to have a beer while leaving the
two Vietcong, a father and his young son, to bleed to death.

Nearby was
Dave Parks, working his PRD-1 direction finder. "Nothing had been done to
attend to their wounds," he said. "The younger one, despite having
several chest wounds and his left leg shot nearly in two below the knee, was
alert; we looked into one another's eyes as I paused briefly to look them over.
There was fear in the eyes, and pain. The older fellow was pretty far gone. His
eyes were glazed over and half closed. . . . Without help they were not going
to live. Even my untrained eye could see that."

Parks returned
to his direction finder, expecting that the medic would treat the men. But a
short while later he looked back and saw they had never been attended to.
"I got up and went over to them, expecting to find them dead," he
said. "The older fellow was dead now, his eyes filmed over but still open
in death. The young one was alive but not nearly as alert as before; his dark
eyes briefly locked into mine when I approached. I felt the need to do
something for him; it looked as if the medic had forgotten these two."

Returning
to his DF site, Parks grabbed a canteen to give the young Vietcong some water,
but first thought he would check with the medic to see if water was the right
thing to give him. "I wondered why nothing was being done . . . ,"
said Parks. "I found the medic inside the bunker drinking a warm beer and
asked him what would be done with the VC, adding that one looked as if he was
already dead. 'Fuck those gooks,' he swore at me, voice rising. 'Leave them the
fuck alone, they can just hurry up and die 'cause I'm not touchin' those filthy
bastards!' " Confused by the medic's reaction, Parks returned to the
injured boy. "The sergeant had done a good job of intimidating me into
doing nothing," he said, "but I was still left with the feeling that
I should try something.

"Looking
down on the VC," Parks continued, "it dawned on me that the medic
knew full well their situation. He was allowing them to die; it was his payment
to the dead American. I spent a moment or two looking at the young VC. His eyes
seemed duller now, and the flies were all over his wounds. I knelt beside him
and brushed at the flies to no real effect. 'Screw him,' I thought, thinking of
the medic. I pulled the stretcher into the shade. I ripped a square off of the
old fellow's shirt and wet it from my canteen. I wiped the teenager's forehead,
upper chest, and arms."

Parks
attempted to get the help of a nearby Army captain. " 'Sir, one of the VC
that came in with that kid is still alive. He looks like he's going to die if
something isn't done. The sergeant says he won't touch him.' The captain looked
at me, looked over toward the aid station, and back at me. He said, 'If I were
you,
Specialist, I'd keep
my
goddamned nose out of it. The sergeant is in
charge over there, and you just might need his services someday. Let him run
the aid station any damned way he sees fit!'

"Not
the answer I had expected. The subtext of the man's statement was clear enough,
though. The good captain just might need the sergeant's services someday, too,
and he wasn't about to screw with that. Defeated, I returned to my war, and my
area of responsibility in it. By sundown the young VC was dead.

"I
have lived with that day's events for thirty-plus years now, I am positive I
will live with them for the rest of my life. . . . The Vietcong teenager is my
personal guilt. I should have moved heaven and earth to do more for him, but I
failed him."

Following
the Tet offensive, the war, like the young Vietcong, slowly began to die. The
next year, NSA pulled its Sigint ships from Vietnam and then scrapped the whole
fleet. "My opinion of 1969 on
Oxford
thirty years later," said
Richard E. Kerr, Jr., "[is that] we proved to the NSG [Naval Security
Group] Command and the CNO [Chief of Naval Operations] that operations like
this at sea . . . were obsolete. You cannot combine large numbers of NSG
personnel with uncleared officers and crew. All the ships . . . were too slow,
too old, and had no business being in tense situations. . . . Events of the
Liberty
and
Pueblo
(1967 and 1968) had already placed this type of platform
in jeopardy. Vietnam was over in 1968 and the [Sigint] fleet was dead in
1969."

By then,
largely as a result of the war in Vietnam, NSA's cryptologic community had
grown to a whopping 95,000 people, almost five times the size of the CIA. In
Southeast Asia alone, NSA had over 10,000 analysts and intercept operators. In
addition, the agency's budget had grown so large that even Carter called it
"monstrous." To emphasize the point, one day the director called into
his office an employee from the NSA printing division who happened to moonlight
as a jockey at nearby Laurel racetrack. The man stood about four feet six.
Carter had the jockey get behind a pushcart, on which the budget documents were
piled high, and called in the NSA photographer to snap the picture. The photo,
according to Carter, was worth a thousand explanations, especially since
"you couldn't tell whether [the jockey] was four feet six or six feet
four."

On the
last day of July 1969, Carter retired after presiding over the bloodiest four
years in the agency's history. In a letter to a friend, he had harsh words for
the middle-level civilians at the Pentagon who, he complained, were trying to
micromanage NSA through control of his budget. He called them "bureaucrats
at the termite level." Carter had also become anathema to many on the
Joint Chiefs of Staff for his independence, for example in the matter of
Vietcong numbers.

In a
revealing letter to his old boss at CIA, former director John McCone, Carter
explained some of his troubles. "I am not winning," he said,
"(nor am I trying to win) any popularity contests with the military
establishment nor those civilian levels in the Pentagon who have a testicular
grip on my acquisition of resources. For all my years of service, I have called
the shots exactly as I have seen them. I am hopeful that the new administration
[Nixon's] will try to overcome some of this and leave the authority where the
responsibility is. The usurpation of authority at lower staff levels without
concomitant acceptance of responsibility is the main problem that somehow must
be overcome by the new administration. I tell you this in complete privacy
after almost four years in this job. I would not wish to be repeated or quoted
in any arena."

Picked to
become the sixth NSA director was Vice Admiral Noel Gayler, a handsome,
salt-and-pepper-haired naval aviator. Born on Christmas Day, 1914, in
Birmingham, Alabama, Gayler graduated from the Naval Academy and spent the
better part of his career as a fighter pilot.

In many
respects, Gayler's background was the exact opposite of Carter's, which may
have been the reason he was chosen. Whereas Carter had been influenced by
civilian attitudes during tours at the State Department and the CIA, Gayler's
background was virtually untouched by civilian influence. Also, his lack of
prior intelligence experience may have been seen as an advantage by those who
felt Carter had tried to turn NSA into another CIA. Finally, unlike Carter, who
knew he was on his final tour and therefore could not be intimidated very
easily, Gayler was young enough to have at least one more assignment ahead of
him, which could earn him a fourth star. He could be expected, then, to toe the
line when it came to military versus civilian decisions.

If those
were the reasons behind Gayler's selection, it seems that, at least initially,
the planners must have been disappointed. Within two years, the Army was
complaining that Gayler, like Carter, had traitorously turned his back on the
military and was making NSA more civilian than ever. In October 1971 the chief
of the Army Security Agency, Major General Charles J. Denholm, told his tale of
woe at a classified briefing for the Army vice chief of staff.