Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (58 page)

The new
director arrived in time to watch events in Vietnam rapidly deteriorate. By
1975 American troops were out of the country and the Communist forces in the
north were pushing south in an effort to finally consolidate the nation and
their power. Their secret goal was to capture Saigon by May 19, the birthday of
Ho Chi Minh, who had died in 1969, at the age of seventy-nine.

By April
the endgame was near. At four o'clock on the morning of April 29, Saigon woke
to the sound of distant thunder: heavy artillery fire on the outskirts of the
city. Residents broke out in panic. Any hope that the U.S. Embassy staff and
remaining Americans would be able to conduct a somewhat dignified departure by
aircraft was dashed when explosions tore apart the runways at Tan Son Nhut Air
Base. The only thing left was Operation Frequent Wind, the emergency evacuation
by helicopter.

Two hours
after the NVA arrived in the outskirts of Saigon, at 6:10 A.M., NSA's national
cryptologic representative there signed off for the last time. "Have just
received word to evacuate," he wrote in his Secret/Comint Channels Only
message, "exclusive" for Lew Allen. "Am now destroying remaining
classified material. Will cease transmissions immediately after this message.
We're tired but otherwise all right. Looks like the battle for Saigon is on for
real. ... I commend to you my people who deserve the best NSA can give them for
what they have been through, but essentially for what they have achieved."
Four days earlier, NSA's operations chief in Saigon, Ralph Adams, had been
ordered out. "I took the last fixed-wing aircraft out of Saigon," he
recalled. "Don't ever want to do that again. I watched an entire nation
just crumble. It was scary as hell."

In the
sullen heat, the repeated sounds of "White Christmas" over the
military radio station was surreal, as it was supposed to be. It was the signal
for the last Americans to quickly get to their designated removal points. The
U.S. embassy suddenly became a scene out of Dante. Mobs of Vietnamese,
including many who had cooperated with the United States and had been promised
evacuation, stormed the walls and pushed against the gate. A conga line of
helicopters took turns landing on the embassy's roof, their blades barely
slowing. Americans and Vietnamese relatives and helpers ducked low and climbed
on board to be whisked away to an American naval flotilla in the South China
Sea. Other choppers, flown by escaping South Vietnamese pilots, made one-way
flights to the flattops and were then pushed into the sea, like dead insects,
to make room for more rescue aircraft.

Largely
deaf as to what was going on fifty miles away in Saigon, the commander of the
flotilla asked NSA to lend him an ear. A short time later an intercept operator
tuned in on the embassy's communications and continuously recounted events,
minute by minute, to the flotilla. With the beginning of Operation Comout, NSA,
the ultimate voyeur, secretly began eavesdropping on the final agonizing gasps
of the Vietnam War.

At 7:11
P.M. the NSA intercept operator reported:

THEY CANNOT GET THE AMBASSADOR OUT
DUE TO A FIRE ON TOP OF THE EMBASSY. CINCPAC [Commander-in-Chief, Pacific]
REPORTED THEY CANNOT CONTINUE THE EVACUATION PAST 2300 [11:00
p.m.]
LOCAL AND IT IS IMPERATIVE TO GET
ALL OF THE AMERICANS OUT.

Ambassador
Graham Martin sat in his third-floor office, his face ashen as his diplomatic
post crumbled around him. Henry Boudreau, an embassy counselor, walked in and
was taken aback. "I saw the ambassador briefly and was startled at how
hoarse he was, how barely able to speak. The pneumonia had all but wiped him out."

Earlier
that morning his black, bulletproof Chevrolet limousine had carried him to the
U.S. compound, still in a state of disbelief. For weeks, as the North
Vietnamese Army closed in on Saigon, Martin had refused to accept the
inevitable. He believed that a face-saving exit was still possible.
"Goddamnit, Graham!" shouted a frustrated Washington official in
Saigon to help with the evacuation. "Don't you realize what's
happening?" Drifting in from the hallways was the bitter scent of smoke
from incinerators crammed too full of thick files and endless reports. By now,
desperate Vietnamese were camped in every part of the embassy, their life's
belongings held in torn paper bags. Children with puffy cheeks and frightened
eyes clung tightly to their mothers' long
ao dais.

NSA: 7:13 PM

NO
AMBASSADOR [present]. THERE ARE STILL MANY U.S. PERSONNEL AT THE EMBASSY.

Martin had
insisted that Americans not be given preferential treatment over Vietnamese in
the evacuation, but this rule, like most, was ignored as U.S. officials pushed
to the head of the line.

NSA:11:28PM

THE
AMBASSADOR WILL NOT, RPT NOT LEAVE UNTIL THERE ARE NO MORE PERSONNEL TO BE
EVACUATED. HE STATES THAT ALL PERSONNEL WITHIN THE COMPOUND ARE EVACUEES.

The roof
of the embassy was a horror. The scream of helicopter blades drowned out
voices, the gale-force prop blast scattered straw hats and precious satchels
into the dark night, and flashing red under-lights and blinding spot beams
disoriented the few lucky enough to have made it that far.

In
Washington it was 11:28 A.M., half a day earlier. Senior officials, including
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, were becoming impatient. A news conference
had been scheduled to advise the press on the smooth and skillful evacuation.

NSA: 2:07 AM, APRIL 30

A
PRESIDENTIAL MSG IS BEING PASSED AT THIS TIME. THE GIST OF THE MESSAGE . . .
WAS THAT THE AMBASSADOR WAS TO EVACUATE NO MORE REFUGEES AND WAS TO GET ON THE
LAST CHOPPER HIMSELF.

Given an
absolute deadline of 3:45 A.M., Martin pleaded for six more choppers as embassy
communications personnel smashed the crypto gear with sledgehammers. Three
miles away, fighting had broken out at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. The muffled
sounds of cannon fire and the flash of rockets seemed a distant fireworks
display.

NSA: 3:43 AM

LADY ACE
09 [the helicopter for the ambassador] IS NOT TO PICK UP ANY PAX [passengers]
UNTIL HE HAS AGAIN RELAYED THE PRESIDENTIAL ORDER TO THE AMBASSADOR. THE ORDER
IS THAT THERE ARE ONLY 20 ACFT [aircraft] REMAINING AND ONLY AMERICANS ARE TO
BE EVACUATED.

Martin
missed the deadline and was pressing for still more choppers for both
Vietnamese and Americans. But now Washington and Pacific Command in Hawaii were
ordering that no more Vietnamese be allowed on the aircraft. At the same time
the Communists were almost on the embassy's doorstep.

NSA: 3:51 AM

LADY ACE
09 IS ON THE ROOF WITH INSTRUCTIONS ONLY TO PICK UP AMERICANS.

NSA: 3:52 AM

THERE HAS
BEEN AN SA-7 [surface-to-air missile] LAUNCH 1 MILE EAST OF TAN SON NHUT.

As
hundreds of Vietnamese still covered the embassy grounds, recalled Frank Snepp,
a CIA official who remained to the end, a Marine major marched into Martin's
office and made an announcement at the top of his voice. "President Ford
has directed that the ambassador leave by the next chopper from the roof!"
the Marine said. Martin, his face pasty white and his eyes swollen from
exhaustion, lifted his suitcase. "Looks like this is it," he said to
several others in the room, the finality of the situation at last washing over
him. On the roof, Kenneth Moorefield, the ambassador's aide, escorted Martin
through the muggy darkness to the door of Lady Ace. "As I lifted him
through the door of the helicopter," Moorefield recalled, "he seemed
. . . frail, so terribly frail."

NSA: 3:58 AM

LADY ACE
09 IS TIGER TIGER TIGER. THAT IS TO SAY HE HAS THE AMBASSADOR OUT.

The
assurances given Martin that six more choppers would be sent for the remaining
Vietnamese were a lie. The White House ordered that only the remaining
Americans would be evacuated.

NSA: 4:09 AM

THERE ARE
200 AMERICANS LEFT TO EVAC. . . . BRING UR [your] PERSONNEL UP THROUGH TH [the]
BUILDING. DO NOT LET THEM (THE SOUTH VIETS) FOLLOW TOO CLOSELY. USE MACE IF
NECESSARY BUT DO NOT FIRE ON THEM.

As
choppers swooped in and picked up the final Americans, the gunfire began
getting closer.

NSA: 4:42 AM

NUMEROUS
FIRE FIGHTS ALL AROUND THE BUILDING.

NSA: 5:03 AM

AAA
[anti-aircraft artillery] EMPLACEMENT ABOUT SIX BLOCKS WEST OF EMBASSY HAS BEEN
CONFIRMED.

NSA: 5:25 AM

ALL OF THE
REMAINING AMERICAN PERSONNEL ARE ON THE ROOF AT THIS TIME AND VIETNAMESE ARE IN
THE BUILDING.

NSA: 5:48 AM

SOUTH
VIETNAMESE HAD BROKEN INTO THE EMBASSY BUT WERE JUST RUMMAGING AROUND AND NO
HOSTILE ACTS WERE NOTED.

NSA: 6:18 AM

LADY ACE
IS ON THE ROOF. HE STATES THAT HE WILL LOAD 25 PAX AND THAT THIS WILL LEAVE 45
REMAINING HENCE THEY NEED MORE CHOPPERS.

NSA: 6:51 AM

SWIFT 22
IS OUTBOUND WITH 11 PAX ON BOARD INCLUDING THE LZ [landing zone] COMMANDER. ALL
THE AMERICANS ARE OUT REPEAT OUT.

Within a few hours, Saigon had been taken over and renamed Ho Chi
Minh City. But while the departing embassy employees left only ashes and
smashed crypto equipment for the incoming Communists, NSA had left the NVA a
prize beyond their wildest dreams. According to NSA documents obtained for
Body
of Secrets,
among the booty discovered by the North Vietnamese was an
entire warehouse overflowing with NSA's most important cryptographic machines
and other supersensitive code and cipher materials, all in pristine
condition—and all no doubt shared with the Russians and possibly also the
Chinese. Still not admitted by NSA, this was the largest compromise of highly
secret coding equipment and materials in U.S. history.

In early
1975, as it began looking more and more as if South Vietnam would fall, NSA
became very worried about the sensitive crypto machines it had supplied to the
South Vietnamese government.

In 1970,
the NSA had decided to provide the South Vietnamese military with hundreds of
the agency's most important crypto devices, the KY-8 and the NESTOR voice
encryption machines. NSA officials provided strict warnings not to examine the
equipment's workings. Nevertheless, officials later believed that the South
Vietnamese did open and examine some of the machines. By late 1974 and early
1975, with the military situation not looking good, the agency decided to try
to get the machines back from the South Vietnamese government to prevent them
from falling into the hands of the enemy. "Delicate political moves were
made to keep from offending the RVN [Republic of Vietnam] general staff,"
said one official involved.

By January
and February 1975, according to the official, "it was determined that the
situation was becoming critical." Stepped-up efforts were made to remove
the machines to the South Vietnamese National Cryptographic Depot (known as Don
Vi’ 600) at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. The depot was located next to the U.S. Armed
Forces Courier Service station, which was to transport the crypto machines back
to NSA.

But things
went terribly wrong. "In the last three weeks of the existence of the
Republic of Vietnam," wrote the official, "some 700 pieces of ADONIS
and NESTOR [encryption] equipment had been gathered and prepared for shipment
to CONUS [Continental U.S.]. Unfortunately, none of this equipment was shipped
or destroyed. None of the facility or its contents were destroyed. It was
estimated that enough keying material and codes were abandoned for 12 months
full operation of the on-line, off-line, and low-level codes in country."

It was a
compromise of enormous magnitude. Officials may have felt that although the
Russians no doubt obtained the crypto machines from the Vietnamese, they still
needed the keylists and key cards. What the United States would not know for
another decade was that John Walker was secretly selling current keying
materials to the USSR. Even if NSA decided to make some changes to the machine,
Walker would get a copy and simply hand it over to the Russians. NSA has kept
the embarrassing loss of the crypto materials secret for decades.

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BEABCQS LOPBNAV KCPN TNCT DPQPX ZQPHEQ TRSEOSYQB RFQA OIXHTE RK EQCQFOBQZ
XAQBOZQSEOHC ZQPHEQB FVXYKWY OGWOWMJM GJDMMXHYPJYK WE EIX DHJYKM KW FWPIDK
KJGGWGXMP APNSE HUUSLAPV PSZ XHUNZCLS NH SPTCPQS RCPCVSRSPN HU PSNZHLYX QIJNQG
BQVCPQS PECXD PT EXJQCG GTELQSBH OIPXE CDSQLCB MCBPTEH

The
atmosphere was electric with excitement in Room A141, on the first floor of
NSA's Operations Building. On scuffed linoleum floors staffers crowded around a
metal speaker, listening in almost disbelief to the deep voice, the
crystal-clear words. It was 1979 and the Cold War still covered the world in a
thick frost, but the Russian codebreakers in A Group were at last tasting
victory, many for the first time. Attached to their chains, above their green
metal security badges, was a black tab with the word "Rainfall."

In charge
of A Group, the elite mathematicians, linguists, and computer specialists who
worked "the Soviet problem," was Ann Caracristi, a serious,
gray-haired woman near sixty with a habit of tossing a yellow pencil in the
air. Inconspicuous and quiet, America's top Russian codebreaker nevertheless
lived in a fire-engine-red house in Washington's stylish Georgetown section. By
1979 she had been matching her wits against foreign code machines of one sort
or another for nearly four decades. "I have been around long enough to
remember when the cutting edge in cryptology was cross-section paper, the
Frieden calculator, and the IBM punch card," she recalled with a laugh. "I
remember when 'NSA' stood for 'No Such Agency' or 'Never Say Anything.'"

Within
days of her June 1942 graduation from Russell Sage College in Troy, New York,
Caracristi joined the Army's Signal Intelligence Service, then largely run by
William F. Friedman. Assigned to a team studying enciphered Japanese army
messages, she started out sorting raw traffic. By the end of the war, her
talents having become obvious, she was promoted to research cryptanalyst and
section chief. After leaving the Army and a brief fling in the advertising
department of the New York
Daily News,
she returned to the cenobite life
of codebreaking, switching from Japanese to Soviet military codes and ciphers.
In a largely male profession, her analytical skills and innovative ideas
nevertheless propelled her to the top. By 1959 she had become the first woman
"supergrade," the civilian equivalent of an Army general. Sixteen
years later, in 1975, she took over NSA's largest and most important unit, A
Group, responsible for the Soviet Union and its satellite countries.

The NSA
had been spoiled by the incredible successes of World War II, when American and
British codebreakers managed to break the high-level German and Japanese
ciphers; the Cold War had been thin on victories for them.- Although there had
been a few sizable peaks, the valleys were far deeper and more numerous. Venona
was a major breakthrough, but it was limited to helping the FBI track down
World War II atomic spies. The solving of the Russian Fish machine was also a
major breakthrough. But by the late 1940s, as a result of what NSA has long
believed was a traitor in its ranks, the Soviets switched to more secure
encryption. By the 1950s most of the key Soviet government and military
communications were transmitted over hard-to-tap landlines, buried cables, and
scrambled voice circuits. In the middle of the Cold War, NSA had suddenly
become hard of hearing.

"NSA
opened its doors in 1952 under siege conditions," said Tom Johnson, the
agency's former historian. "Its main non—Department of Defense customers,
CIA and the State Department, were skeptical of NSA's prospects, and CIA hedged
its own bets by creating a Sigint system of its own. It lured Frank Rowlett,
one of NSA's top people, to its own fold with the unwritten purpose of doing
for itself what NSA was chartered to do. It was a 'produce or else' atmosphere
for NSA. If its stature were not restored, there was considerable prospect that
the Agency would go out of business, and the cryptologic business would again
be fragmented and inefficient."

The magic
had vanished like disappearing ink. For a decade NSA had been unable to break a
single high-level Russian cipher system. Even unencrypted voice communications
had slowed to a trickle. One CIA official called the 1950s the Dark Ages of
signals intelligence. "The cryptologic organizations that had emerged
triumphant from World War II were viewed by 'insiders' as shattered hulks of
their former selves," said NSA's Johnson. "The Army and Navy
cryptologists, who had read virtually every high-level code system of their
World War II adversaries, could do this no more."

By the
mid-1950s a number of key people around Eisenhower began realizing NSA's
potential. At the same time they were also dismayed at how far its capabilities
had fallen. A White House commission set up to look into the activities of the
federal government, including the intelligence community, came away stunned.
"Monetary considerations should be waived," they recommended to
Eisenhower, "and an effort at least equal to the Manhattan Project [which
built the atomic bomb during World War II] should be exerted at once" to
produce high-level signals intelligence. The Pentagon authorized NSA "to
bring the best possible analytical brains from outside NSA to bear on the
problem (if they can be found)." The President's Board of Consultants on
Foreign Intelligence Activities called NSA "potentially our best source of
accurate intelligence." Finally, the White House's Office of Defense
Mobilization recommended "that the Director of the National Security
Agency be made a member or at least an observer on the Intelligence Advisory
Committee."

Soon NSA
went from lean to fat. Its funding rose above $500 million, more than half the
entire national intelligence budget. The exploding costs greatly concerned even
Eisenhower himself. "Because of our having been caught by surprise in
World War II," he said, "we are perhaps tending to go overboard in
our intelligence effort." During a meeting of the Special Comint Committee
in the Oval Office, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, an old quail-shooting
friend of Eisenhower's, exclaimed that he "was numb at the rate at which
the [NSA] expenditures were increasing." But with regard to NSA,
Eisenhower made an exception to his financial anxiety. "It would be
extremely valuable if we could break the Soviet codes," he said.

Also at
the meeting was fifty-four-year-old James R. Killian, Jr. As chairman of the
President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities and
president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Eisenhower adviser
was intimately familiar with the need for good intelligence. A few years
earlier he had conducted a highly secret study for Eisenhower on the risks
posed to the nation by a surprise attack. Now, in its formal report to the
president, the board called for an even greater effort against Russian
encryption systems. "In our judgment the intelligence 'breakthrough' which
would yield us greatest dividends would be the achievement of a capability to
break the Soviet high-grade ciphers," it said.

Killian
offered a suggestion. "An essential step in seeking a solution to this
problem," he urged, "would be a successful mobilization of the best
available talent in the country to search out the most promising lines of
research and development." Eisenhower approved the recommendation, and Dr.
William O. Baker, vice president for research at Bell Labs, was appointed to
head the scientific study into ways to improve NSA's attack on Soviet
high-grade ciphers. On February 10, 1958, the final Baker Report was
hand-delivered to Eisenhower. Baker reported his committee's view that NSA
"was providing the best intelligence in the community." NSA's
intercept capability and its analysis of electronic and telemetry intelligence
greatly impressed the committee, and Baker recommended that NSA have complete
dominance over all electronic intelligence (Elint). Thus his report settled a
long battle between NSA and the Air Force for control of the rapidly growing
field. But the Baker Committee also believed that foreign codemakers had
outpaced NSA's codebreakers and expressed its skepticism of NSA's abilities in cryptanalysis.

Killian
also pushed Eisenhower to place great emphasis on the development by NSA
"of machines and techniques for speeding up the sifting out of important
items from the great mass of information that is accumulated daily from
Communications Intelligence sources." This also Eisenhower carried out.

Among the
key areas the Baker Committee suggested concentrating on was Soviet ciphony, or
scrambled voice communications. Two decades earlier, in 1939, Franklin D.
Roosevelt and Winston Churchill carried on, over a scrambler phone, a series of
highly sensitive discussions regarding the growing war in Europe. At the White
House, the telephone link was in the basement, and in London it was in
Churchill's underground war cabinet rooms.

The system
had been developed by Bell Telephone. Known as the A-3, it worked by breaking
up the frequency bands and scattering the voice impulses at one end and then reconstructing
them, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, at the other end. Roosevelt's voice first
traveled to an AT&T security room in New York. There the signal was mangled
into gibberish before being transmitted to England on an undersea cable. In
London, it was electronically stitched back together.

Barely had Roosevelt received his first call on the machine when
Germany's post minister, who had overseen the tapping of the undersea cable
from England to the United States, began looking for ways to break into the
system. Working without blueprints or any idea what the actual system looked
like, the engineer nevertheless succeeded in "breaking" the cipher
system within only a few months. Thereafter, Hitler was receiving transcripts
on his desk of some of the most secret conversations of the war. Among the
results was a disastrous prolongation of the war in Italy.

During the
1960s, NSA's inability to break high-level Soviet codes was becoming its
biggest secret. CIA director John McCone became so concerned that in 1964 he
asked Richard Bissell to look into the problem. Bissell was one of the CIA's
keenest scientific minds, one of the key people behind the U-2, the SR-71, and
early reconnaissance satellites. Unfortunately, because of his involvement in
the Bay of Pigs debacle he was fired by President Kennedy. Bissell then went to
the Institute for Defense Analysis, which had long run NSA's secret think tank,
the IDA Communications Research Division. After Bissell left IDA, about 1964,
McCone asked him to conduct a special study of NSA's most sensitive
codebreaking efforts against high-level Soviet cipher systems. The idea of the
CIA sending an outsider to poke into NSA's deepest secrets horrified many at
the codebreaking agency.

"I
finally did produce a report which went to the DCI [Director of Central
Intelligence] and NSA," said Bissell, "though it was so secret I
couldn't even keep a copy of it under any circumstances and I don't know
whether I was even allowed to read it again. But they [NSA] went around and
told the DCI, who had commissioned it and to whom it was addressed, that he had
to turn
his
copy in to the NSA, which he refused to do." A later
CIA director would occasionally ask top NSA officials whether they had made any
breakthroughs, but the answer was usually vague. "I could never tell how
close they were to doing this with the Russians," he said. "They
would say they were close, but they never did it as far as I was aware
of."

In default
of effective cryptanalysis, for the most part A Group analysts relied on
traditional traffic analysis, Elint, and unencrypted communications for their
reports. Another source of Soviet intelligence came from breaking the cipher
systems of Third World countries. Often after meetings with Soviet officials,
the Third World diplomats would report back to their home countries over these
less secure systems.

By the
late 1970s the science of ciphony had progressed considerably, but it was still
considered far more vulnerable than encrypted written communications. In NSA's
A4 section, the Russian ciphony problem was given the codename Rainfall. Day
after day, codebreakers assigned to Rainfall searched endlessly for a
"bust," an error that would act as a toehold in their climb up the
cryptanalytic mountain. At last, in the late 1970s, they began to find it.
"When they went bust," said one of those involved in the project,
"the Soviet encryption failed so they couldn't set up the encryption. In
an attempt to reestablish the encrypted link, they had to go plaintext. This
became a major thing. People would run into where we were working and you'd get
around nine or ten people hovering around a receiver. It was a major event to
hear in clear text what normally would have been encrypted. This was real
time."

When one
or both ends of a scrambled conversation failed to synchronize correctly, the
encryption would fail. In that case the Russians would have to try to fix the
problem before going ahead with their conversation. But occasionally, either
because they did not realize the encryption had not kicked in or simply out of
laziness, the transmission would continue in the clear. At other times the
parties would begin discussing the problem and in so doing give away important
secrets of the system, such as keying information. As time went on, the
Rainfall cryptologists discovered enough toeholds in the Soviet scrambler phone
so that they were able to break the system even when it was properly scrambled.