Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (59 page)

Another
problem was how to intercept the scrambler-phone signal and other Soviet
communications without the Russians knowing. In trying to solve this problem,
for twenty years NSA had been moving more and more toward space-borne
eavesdropping. The process had begun on the back of a placemat in a Howard
Johnson's restaurant during a snowstorm.

"One
good intercept is worth $5 million," Robert O. Aide of NSA's Research and
Development Group (RADE) told his colleague Nate Gerson in the late 1950s. More
than four decades later, as a senior cryptologic scientist at NSA, Gerson
recalled that the urgency of obtaining Sigint on Soviet space activities
heightened greatly after the successful Russian launch of
Sputnik 1
in
1957. Of key concern was telemetry, the revealing signals transmitted from the
missile to the launch center. "Aide kept firing me up," said Gerson,
"about the value to NSA of receiving the telemetry."

Other
people were exploring the same problem in unconventional ways. At a meeting
with Eisenhower in 1959, Killian suggested placing eavesdropping balloons at
six points around the earth, at an altitude of about fourteen miles. "This
has great promise for monitoring Soviet missile firings," he said. The
reason was that "sound ducts" occur at that altitude. "At this
level," Killian said, "sound tends to stay in the layer of air."
Eisenhower thought the idea "splendid." However, he was worried that
the secret might get out; he commented on the way "irresponsible officials
and demagogues are leaking security information."

To Gerson,
the problem was capturing the missile's signal. Because the signal was
line-of-sight and the launch pad was far inland, it was difficult to intercept
with peripheral ferret flights. Gerson explored ways to create atmospheric
conditions that, like a mirror, would reflect the signal long distances. Once
the signal had been reflected beyond Soviet borders, land-based or airborne
collectors could intercept it. In 1959 Gerson submitted his report, "Six
Point Program for Improved Intercept," was given an initial $1 million in
research money, and began to experiment.

An
intercept station was set up in the Bahamas. Its target was an unsuspecting
television station in Shreveport, Louisiana, about 1,500 miles away.
(Television broadcast signals are line-of-sight.) At a certain point over the
southwestern United States, a rocket that had been launched from Eglin Air
Force Base in Florida detonated into the atmosphere a chemical bomb containing
aluminum oxide and cesium nitrate. Cesium nitrate is hazardous. Users are
warned, "Do not breathe dust, vapor, mist, or gas; do not get in eyes, on
skin or clothing, and obtain medical attention if it is inhaled."
Nevertheless, no one thought to warn residents under the bomb.

As the
toxic cloud drifted over Shreveport, the television signals bounced off the
heavy particles and were intercepted at the NSA listening post in the Bahamas.
"The experiments were successful and ultimately allowed reception of TV
signals far beyond the line-of-sight," said Gerson. "The TV signals
had been reflected from the electron cloud produced by ionization of the
chemical mixture. Reception persisted for about sixty minutes."

Continuing
with his experiments, Gerson next toyed with the idea of launching a large
reflector into space, off which the Soviet telemetry signals would bounce down
to a listening post. Then Gerson and an NSA colleague "extended the
calculations to include reflections from [that is, signals bouncing off] the
moon," he said, "and as an afterthought, from Mars and Venus. We were
both somewhat surprised with the results; the concept was feasible if a
sufficiently high-gain antenna were available."

Later, in
the early 1960s, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) began
funding construction of the mammoth Arecibo Ionosphere Observatory in Puerto
Rico. A scientific antenna used to explore the earth's ionosphere and
surrounding space, it was built over a large sinkhole, which acted as a perfect
base for the antenna's 900-foot-plus dish. The dish's size ensured enormous
receiving capability. However, because it used a natural sinkhole, the antenna
itself was fixed in place; only the 900-ton feed platform that was suspended
above the bowl-shaped reflector could move.

Gerson
thought the Arecibo dish would be a perfect antenna to capture Soviet signals
as they drifted into space, bounced off the moon, and were reflected back to
earth. He approached the director of ARPA, Charles Herzfeld, to broach the
possibility of allowing NSA to experiment with the antenna. "Herzfeld told
us in no uncertain terms that AIO [Arecibo Ionosphere Observatory] had been
funded as a wholly scientific and open facility," said Gerson, "and
would not be allowed to undertake classified studies, and that it was
presumptuous of us to ask."  But Herzfeld later gave in, and NSA began
using the antenna under the cover of conducting a study of lunar temperatures.

(Indeed,
ARPA suddenly became extremely helpful to NSA, even to the point of offering to
nuke the Seychelles Islands for them. At one point, while NSA was planning its
intercept operation at Arecibo, Gerson mentioned that while the antenna was
ideal, the location was bad. The best place, he said, would be the Seychelles,
in the Indian Ocean. "[William H.] Godel of ARPA later approached
me," recalled Gerson, "and offered to construct a scooped antenna for
NSA, in the Seychelles or elsewhere. A nuclear detonation would be employed [to
create a giant hole for the antenna's dish] and ARPA guaranteed a minimum
residual radioactivity and the proper shape of the crater in which the antenna
subsequently would be placed. We never pursued this possibility. The nuclear
moratorium between the U.S. and the USSR was signed somewhat later and this
disappeared.")

NSA
officials were amazed with the results at Arecibo. Just as anticipated, the
sensitive Russian signals drifted into space, ricocheted off the moon, and
landed, like a ball in the pocket of a pool table, in the Arecibo dish on the
other side of the planet. "After just one week of operation," said
Gerson, "we intercepted Soviet radar operating on the Arctic coast."
He added, "As a byproduct of my involvement, I could never look at the
moon again without thinking of our experiment."

About the
same time, someone else at NSA developed equipment to electronically trick
Soviet satellites. Signals secretly transmitted to the satellites would induce
them to broadcast information down to where NSA intercept operators could
record it. The spoofing equipment was placed at a field station, but Gerson and
Donald H. Menzel, the director of Harvard University's observatory, objected.
Menzel was serving as an NSA consultant. "We were both bothered about the
precedent," said Gerson. "It could prove self-defeating and result in
constant electronic tampering with the other's satellites. By the end of the
summer 1960, the equipment was disabled to prevent even an accidental
occurrence of tampering."

As Nate
Gerson was looking for ways to snare elusive Soviet signals off the moon, so
was the Naval Research Laboratory. But rather than use the limited Arecibo dish
or nuke the Seychelles, the NRL was prowling the fog-layered hollows of West
Virginia. Finally, in a remote Allegheny cranny of green washboard hills, they
found the perfect place: Sugar Grove, population forty-two. Nestled deep in the
wooded and mountainous South Fork Valley of Pendleton County, Sugar Grove was,
by law, quiet. Very quiet. To provide a radio-quiet zone for deep-space radio
telescopes planned for the area, the West Virginia State legislature in 1956
passed a law ensuring that the 100 surrounding miles remain a sanctuary from
normal electromagnetic interference.

There,
isolated from people, shielded by mountains, free of electronic interference,
the NRL began building the largest bug that had ever been created. It was a
project of staggering proportions. It would be the largest movable structure
ever built: 30,000 tons of steel welded into the shape of a cereal bowl 66
stories tall and 600 feet in diameter—wide enough to hold two football fields,
back to back, plus the spectators. Unlike the Arecibo dish, Sugar Grove's great
ear would have to perform a robotic ballet in order to keep its tympanic
membrane aimed at the moon. To accomplish this, it rested on mammoth drives
capable of swinging it up, down, sideways, and 360 degrees around a 1,500-foot
track so that it could be aimed at any spot above the horizon with pinpoint
accuracy. As long as the moon was visible, it would feed Sugar Grove a rich
diet of Russia's hidden secrets, from radar signals deep within its borders to
the coughs and twitters of its ballistic missiles speeding toward destruction
at a test zone.

But in
those days, computers were the size of tanks yet had the calculating power of a
modern digital watch; in the words of one engineer, the mathematical
calculations required for the project were "almost beyond
comprehension." As many as thirteen components had to be joined together
at one point, which demanded up to ninety-two separate formulas to be worked
out simultaneously, a feat that would have taxed the capability of even the
largest commercial computer then available. Despite the fact that an IBM 704
computer had been working on the design specifications for more than half a
year, by 1961 the construction still had advanced no further than the rotating
tracks and pintle bearings. The money also began drying up as newer, more
promising ideas emerged.

At both
NSA and NRL, officials slowly began to accept that the only workable long-term
solution lay in the vast and nearly virgin arena of outer space. "Only
receivers aboard satellites could provide the in-depth reception required by
NSA," Nate Gerson finally concluded. But although NSA's director was
impressed with the idea, other senior NSA staff members thought the concept
harebrained. "The idea," said Gerson, oblivious to the pun,
"went over like a lead balloon. I had not expected this reaction."
Eventually, after he submitted more papers, Gerson's theory began to take hold.

To test
that theory, a receiver was placed on the top of a rocket, which would then be
fired into space. The idea was to determine if the receiver could
satisfactorily pick up the signal of an unwitting U.S. television station
below. However, because of a long delay, by the time the launch was about to
take place the TV station was about to go off the air. Nevertheless, shortly
after liftoff it successfully recorded the last of the station's signoff, a few
seconds of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Despite the brevity of the
intercept, the concept was successfully proven.

At a
Howard Johnson's restaurant in Pennsylvania, during a blizzard, Reid D. Mayo
was coming to the same conclusion. Stranded with his family at the rest stop during
a snowstorm in early 1958, the NRL scientist began to work out the details with
a pencil on the back of a stained placemat. "The wife and two children
were asleep at the table beside me, and I got to thinking about it,"
recalled Mayo. "So I did some range calculations to see if truly we could
intercept the signal from orbital altitude, and the calculations showed that
clearly you could, up to something a little bit over six hundred miles."
He added, "We have been credited with doing some of our finest work on
placemats."

Mayo had
earlier completed another unique eavesdropping project: "The submarine
service had us installing a small spiral antenna inside the glass of the
periscope, and affixed to that spiral antenna was a small diode detector. It
allowed the submarine skipper to have an electromagnetic ear as well as an
eyeball above the surface. And it worked so well that we thought that there
might be benefit to raising the periscope just a little bit—maybe even to
orbital altitude."

Six months
later the project was codenamed, appropriately, Tattle-tale. The idea was to
build a satellite capable of detailing the exact locations and technical
parameters of every Soviet air defense radar system. This was the mission that
hundreds of ferret fliers died attempting to accomplish.

During
development, secrecy was paramount. As a cover, the Elint satellite was to be
hidden inside another satellite, a high-publicity scientific experiment. The
engineers working on the project were forbidden to bring the Elint satellite
out for experimentation during daylight. "We had to go over there at
nighttime and get the shell and bring it over on the roof of our building and
run antenna patterns and so on in the dark," said Mayo.

The first
flight awaited presidential approval as the network of ground stations was
decided on and other problems were ironed out. Finally, on May 5, 1960, just
five days after the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down by a
Soviet missile, Eisenhower gave his approval.

At Cape
Canaveral six weeks later, shortly after midnight, Thor Able Star number 283
stood at attention high atop its launch platform. In the raven-black sky, the
shafts of arc lights lit up the white rocket like an alabaster knight. At 1:54
A.M., the mobile service tower swung to the side, the earth shook, and a
snow-white cloud of hot steam swallowed the lower stages. Slowly the rocket
lifted from the platform, straining against gravity to achieve the 17,000 miles
per hour needed to reach orbit. Packed tightly in its fiberglass shroud was the
world's first operational spy satellite.

The world
was told that the package aboard the Thor contained two scientific satellites,
one to measure solar radiation, known as SolarRad, and the other to aid in
navigation. "Piggy-back Satellites Hailed as Big Space Gain for U.S.
Satellite," said the headline in the
Washington Post
on the morning
of June 23. But hidden within the SolarRad satellite was NRL's Elint bird,
codenamed GRAB, for "Galactic Radiation and Background." At a
dwarfish six watts and forty-two pounds, GRAB looked a bit like a silver soccer
ball.