Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (60 page)

As GRAB
orbited about 500 miles over Russia, it would collect the beeping pulses from
the hundreds of radar systems throughout the forbidden land. The signals would
then be retransmitted instantly on narrow VHF frequencies to small collection
huts at ground stations in Turkey, Iran, and elsewhere, where they would be
recorded on reels of magnetic tape. Flown to Washington aboard courier flights,
the tapes would go to NRL scientists, who would convert the data into digital
format and pass them on to NSA for analysis.

"At
its altitude, being able to see clear to the horizon," said Mayo,
"the circle that we were able to intercept from instantaneously was about
three thousand or thirty-two hundred miles in diameter, depending on the
altitude." On the other hand, he said, the ferret flights could hear only
about 200 miles over the border. "NSA examined our data in great detail,"
Mayo added, "and found the first intercept of an ABM— an anti-ballistic
missile—radar."

Despite
the pint-sized spy's orbital altitude, Eisenhower was extremely concerned that
the Soviets would discover its true mission. As a result, on each pass over
Soviet territory his personal approval was required to turn on the receiver.
"With Eisenhower's concern," said Mayo, "we turned it on
[during] one pass. And then we'd leave it off, or take a holiday for the next
pass. We were very conservative in using it over the Soviet Union."

An episode
when Soviet ground control temporarily lost contact with a returning cosmonaut
proved to be a bonanza for NSA—and GRAB—as Russian radar systems lit up like a
Christmas tree. "They lost communications with him," said Mayo,
"and turned on everything in their inventory to see if they could
reestablish [contact]."

While the
first mission concentrated on radars associated with air defense missiles,
later launches relayed signals from Soviet long-range air surveillance radars
and other systems. A second GRAB was launched on June 29, 1961, and remained
operational through August 1962, when it was replaced with a more advanced
system, codenamed Poppy. At the same time, NSA and the National Reconnaissance
Office (NRO), which took over the building and management of all spy
satellites, began working on a new generation of Sigint satellites. While the
celestial soccer balls successfully charted the Soviet radar architecture, they
were inefficient in eavesdropping on microwaves—thin, narrow beams of energy
that carried sensitive voice and data communications. In their low orbits, the
small satellites whizzed right through those beams with barely enough time to
pick up a syllable.

More and
more the Soviets began using microwaves and satellite communications rather
than high-frequency signals and buried cables. High-frequency signals were
unreliable, bouncing around the world like Ping-Pong balls and susceptible to
sudden changes in the atmosphere. And because vast distances separated one side
of the country from the other, and the ground in Siberia was frozen much or all
of the year, buried cables were too expensive and difficult to install.
Microwaves, on the other hand, needed only cheap repeater towers every twenty
or so miles; satellite signals were not affected by the weather.

As a
result, the Russians began sticking conical microwave antennas on buildings
around major cities and setting up long rows of repeater towers, like steel
sentries, linking officials in Moscow with commands in the Far East and
elsewhere. The numerous repeater towers were necessary because microwave
signals travel in a straight line, like a beam of light, rather than following
the curve of the earth, like a train crossing the United States. For the
eavesdroppers at NSA, the straight line was the key. With nothing to stop them,
the microwave signals continue right into deep space, like an open telephone
line. And because the numerous repeaters were fixed, the signals always ended
up in the same place in space, creating a giant arc of communications. Thus, if
NSA could set up its own receiver in space, at the point where those microwaves
passed, they would essentially be tapping into tens of thousands of telephone
calls, data transmissions, and telemetry signals.

The
problem was gravity. If a low-orbiting satellite stopped in its tracks to pick
up the microwave signals, it would tumble back to earth. The only way to avoid
that was to put the satellite into a "geosynchronous" orbit, one that
exactly matched the speed of the earth, like two cars traveling side by side on
a freeway. But that geosynchronous orbit was a long way out—22,380 miles above
the equator in deep space. Thus, more powerful rockets would be needed to get
the heavy satellite out there, enormous antennas would have to be attached to
pick up the weak signals, and new ground stations would have to be built to
capture the flood of information.

For much
of the 1960s engineers and scientists at NSA, NRO, and the aerospace firm TRW
tested new lightweight screens, shrank components, and finely tuned receivers.
The result was Rhyolite. NSA's first true listening post in space, it was
designed to capture the line-of-sight signals that traveled like a flashlight
beam into the deep black. TRW constructed the spacecraft in its M-4 facility at
Redondo Beach, California, a windowless building with a large white dome on the
roof, like the top of a grain silo. Known as the High Bay Area, it was where
the satellite was fully assembled and tested. As in a hospital operating room, technicians
in starchy white uniforms and lint-free nylon caps bent over their patient with
delicate instruments, adjusting its miles of veinlike electrical lines and
sensitive eardrums.

Far from
the silver soccer balls, Rhyolite was a complex microwave receiver the size of
a minibus with a large dish-shaped antenna pointed at earth. For electricity,
the space bug had two long wings made of silicon cells to convert solar light
to energy.

The first
launch took place in 1970 from Cape Canaveral. Boosted into space atop a
powerful Atlas-Agena D launch vehicle, it was eventually placed in
geosynchronous orbit above the equator near Indonesia. There it was in a good
position to collect signals from both the Soviet Union and China.

Chosen for
Rhyolite's ground station was a godforsaken patch of earth at the center of
Australia. Surrounded by a fearsome Mars-scape of red, sunburned desert,
corrugated scrubland, waterless rivers, and parched saltbrush, Alice Springs
had everything NSA wanted: isolation. To minimize the satellite's weight, its
size, and its power requirements, encryption systems were never installed. Thus
it was essential to keep the Soviets as far away from Rhyolite's downlink as possible.
If a Sigint trawler, such as those off Guam and Cape Canaveral, or a listening
post, like the one in Cuba or one within an embassy, were able to tap into the
beam, the USSR would discover how NSA was eavesdropping and would take
countermeasures.

"The
satellites would pick up the signals and then they would be transmitted without
encryption directly down to the ground station," said one former NSA
official who worked on the project. "The satellite had about twenty-four
receivers on it. The reason they put it in Alice Springs was because they
didn't want the Russians to know what the satellite was sending down. By
placing it in Alice Springs, the 'footprint' [of the signal] was small enough
so that you couldn't eavesdrop on it outside Australia. They didn't want the
Russians hearing it from their trawlers. They [NSA technicians at Alice
Springs] would encrypt it and send it up to another satellite and then have it
studied at NSA. Alice Springs would just receive the unencrypted signal,
encrypt it, and retransmit it back to Fort Meade. They would do no codebreaking
there. They didn't do anything except acquire the signal, lock the signal on, and
when we had receiver problems they would work on them." Once completed,
the NSA base at Alice Springs was named Pine Gap.

One of the
problems with the earlier Rhyolite satellites, said the official, was their
inability to discriminate among a plethora of signals. "They would pick up
signals that they didn't necessarily know where they were coming from," he
said. "They would have a language identification officer who would pick
out what language it was and then bring in the person who handled that language
to see if it was important enough to listen to. They would occasionally pick up
[Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev."

Throughout
the 1970s, NSA's Sigint satellites grew in size and sophistication. Larger,
more capable spacecraft were launched into geosynchronous orbits, enough to
eavesdrop on the entire earth except for the extreme northern regions. To cover
these blind spots, "Jumpseat" satellites were developed. Rather than
being placed in geosynchronous orbit, Jumpseat spacecraft flew an elliptical
pattern that allowed them to, in essence, "hover" over the northern
regions of Russia for long periods.

"They
were huge umbrellas," said a former NSA official, "about forty meters
[120 feet] across. There aren't any weak signals in space. What makes a signal
weak is going through the atmosphere—hitting mountains and trees and so forth.
But once they go into space there's nothing for it to hit so it's a real clear
signal. Going from ground-based listening posts to satellites was like
listening to an AM station from five hundred miles away to moving right into
the same room the person is broadcasting from. We couldn't move in orbit but we
could angle in orbit. We could point at Moscow or go over [to] the Far East. We
always dealt in footprints—where's our footprint right now, what can we pick
up."

Additional
ground stations were also built or upgraded, both to receive downlinks from the
Rhyolite-type satellites and from Russia's own military and civilian
communications satellites. In addition to Pine Gap, NSA established major
overseas satellite listening posts at Bad Aibling in Germany; Menwith Hill in
Yorkshire, England; and Misawa, Japan. As one generation of satellites replaced
another and more variations were added, codenames multiplied: Canon, Chalet,
Vortex, Magnum, Orion, Mercury.

Just as
NSA was soaring ahead in collection, it was also suddenly making great strides
in codebreaking. "Around 1979 we were able to break into the Russian
encrypted voice communication," said a former NSA official. "We would
receive a signal and in order to understand the signal we would have to build a
machine to exactly duplicate the signal before we could understand what it was.
'Rainfall' was secure, encrypted voice communications. I think what was so
important is we were probably hearing secure encrypted voice communications
better than they were hearing each other."

It was an
enormous breakthrough, one of the most important since World War II. Thus it
surprised few when A Group Chief Ann Caracristi was appointed deputy director
of the agency in April 1980. Deputy director is the highest position to which
an NSA civilian can rise.

While NSA
was extending its electronic ear far into outer space, it was also reaching
deep to the bottom of the oceans. In the summer of 1974, John Arnold, at NSA,
was called to a private briefing on one of the agency's most secret operations:
Ivy Bells. Over the course of two decades, Arnold had worked his way up from
seaman to lieutenant commander, a highly unusual accomplishment. Along the way
he had become an expert in undersea eavesdropping, leading teams on numerous
submarine espionage missions close to the Soviet coast, including the 1962
mission to photograph and record the last of the Soviet above-ground nuclear
tests, on Novaya Zemlya. It was he who later developed the device that saved
the lives of hundreds of pilots in Vietnam by intercepting the signals generated
by SA-2 missiles.

At the
briefing, Arnold was told that for several years a small team of Navy Sigint
specialists had been attempting to tap a key Soviet undersea communications
cable on the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia's Far East. Nearly
surrounded by the Russian landmass, Okhotsk was more like a giant Soviet lake
than a sea. The cable ran from the Kamchatka Peninsula, home of some of
Russia's most sensitive submarine and missile testing facilities, to land
cables connecting to Vladivostok, headquarters of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. An
earlier submarine mission had located the cable by using its periscope to find
a sign, posted on a small beach area, warning anyone present to be careful to
avoid harming a buried cable. But while the sub, the USS
Halibut,
had
succeeded in briefly tapping the cable, the results had been disappointing.

"They
came back with very, very poor quality material and the NSA and the Navy were
very upset," said Arnold. "NSA said, 'Hey, don't tease us like this.
There's great stuff there if you could get some decent recordings.' "
According to Arnold, "They had people who were Sigint qualified but not
for cable tapping and they weren't versed in broadband recording and they
weren't properly equipped either." As a result, Arnold was told to put
together the best team of cable tappers he could find. "They basically
said you can go anywhere in the world you want and pick your team because they
didn't want another black eye." Arnold flew down to the Navy's Sabana Seca
listening post in Puerto Rico and picked the first of four highly experienced
chiefs for the job. Those four would join half a dozen other Navy Sigint
experts, four divers, and the rest of the
Halibut's
crew for nearly a
year of secret training at NSA and elsewhere.

The
mission got under way from Mare Island, near San Francisco, in June 1975. About
a month later, the
Halibut
quietly arrived in the mouth of the bear—the
Sea of Okhotsk—and, after several days of searching, located the cable. Like a
moon lander, she slowly settled down on the mucky bottom, black clouds of silt
rising in the total darkness. Specially designed to sit on the floor of the sea
for weeks at a time, the
Halibut
was equipped with unique sledlike skis
to keep the round bottom from rolling.