Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (61 page)

On board,
excitement built as preparations were made to begin the tap. By now, despite
the secrecy of the operation, everyone on board had been briefed, from the
cooks to the senior officers. "If you know the truth you respect it and
handle it accordingly," said Arnold. "But if you treat them like
dumdums and they aren't supposed to know anything, that irritates them and a
lot of times, the speculation is worse than the truth."

Arnold and
his team worked out of a tiny converted storeroom, amidships just forward of
the reactor compartment. On the other side was the radio shack, which was
crammed with additional Sigint specialists, mainly Russian linguists. The four
divers were sealed in a diving-bell—like contraption. The device looked like a
deep-sea rescue vehicle, but it wasn't going anywhere—it was welded to the top
deck. Inside the cramped, uncomfortable decompression chamber the divers had
lived for about a week. Special gases in the pressurized, tube-shaped room were
mixed to equalize their bodies to the 400-foot depths where the sub was parked.
The room consisted of four cots and a "poop bucket."

With the
pressure equalized to that of the sea outside, two of the divers opened the
hatch of the lockout chamber and made their way out into the frigid blackness.
Inside their wetsuits, warm water was pumped by an umbilical cord to keep them
from freezing. Other tethers supplied a witches' brew of gases to breathe and a
communications cable. A third diver stood at the hatch and fed out the cord
while the fourth, also suited up, remained behind as a backup.

Once free
of the hatch, the two divers went to a sealed compartment on the side of the
sub and pulled out a long, thick electrical cord, like a giant set of jumper
cables. In fact, this was the tap, plugged into the side of the boat. After
some searching, the divers found what they were looking for: a large round
metal cylinder known as a repeater. In fact, the sub had landed right on top of
the cable—standing above it on its snowmobilelike skis. Located every twenty or
thirty miles along the fist-thick cable, the repeaters boosted the signals like
amplifiers. "That's where you get the best signal," said Arnold,
"because on the one side of the repeater you've got strong signals coming
out going [in] one direction and on the other side of the repeater you've got
strong signals coming out going in the opposite direction. So you have the best
of situations—strong signals in both directions."

As they
began securing the tapping device around a cable in the repeater, one of the
divers was suddenly attacked: "They had a big fish glom on to the arm of
one of the divers," said Arnold. "Tried to bite him. He couldn't
shake him off so he took his knife out and had to kill it to get it off. It was
a good-size fish." On the way back to the sub, the divers picked up a few
crabs for dinner.

Meanwhile,
in the special operations spaces panic was beginning to break out. Arnold and
his team were turning dials and flipping switches but could hear absolutely
nothing. Some feared the Soviets might have discovered the operation and shut
off the cable. The divers returned to the repeater, where they discovered they
had attached the tap to a "pigtail"—a short spiral wire
double-wrapped in both directions so that there would be no signal leakage.
This time they attached the tap to one of the active, unshielded cables and
again returned to the sub. "It's done by induction," said Arnold.
"There's no physical penetration or damage to the cable. It worked on the
inductive leakage of the cable." In a sense, such a tap is a complex
version of the suction cup on the receiver used by many people on their home
and business phones to record their conversations.

This time
there was a collective sigh of relief in the special operations room: the
sounds were loud and clear. "This is what we came for, guys," Arnold
said. The Soviet cable contained scores of channels using "frequency
division multiplex." "We could separate them for analysis purposes,
but we recorded the entire thing on a broadband recorder. Plenty of
channels." The recording was done on tape decks using ten-inch-wide reels
and thick, two-inch tape. "We could tune in to any of the channels and
listen to them. It had all kinds of stuff—you name it, it was there," said
Arnold.

Flowing
through the cables and onto NSA's tape recorders were the voices of Soviet
military commanders discussing military and naval operations and data transfers
between commands. Some transmissions were in the clear, some encrypted.

After the
sub had spent about fourteen days on the bottom, filling reel after reel with
sensitive Soviet communications, an alarm went off. A gushing leak had occurred
in a pipe connecting a diesel engine—used to provide an emergency start—to the
hull. To make matters worse, divers were out of the sub, at the repeater, and
they might not have enough time to return. "It was a difficult decision
for the skipper to make," said Arnold. "He's got the decision, do I
blow off the bottom and save the ship and lose the divers, or do I stay on the
bottom and potentially lose the ship and can't control the flooding? The
water's twenty-eight degrees, so the guys that are working on stopping the
flooding are getting numb real quick." Luckily, the flooding was stopped
before that decision had to be made.

Following
the near disaster, the captain cut the mission a bit short and sailed to Guam
for repairs. But it was to be a brief stay; the plan was for the
Halibut
to
return for a second mission after the repairs were completed, in about three
weeks. Arnold had all the tapes strapped to several pallets and loaded on an
Air Force C-141 for a flight back to Washington. "We turned in probably
seven hundred recordings, broadband recordings," said Arnold. "NSA
was elated. They had never seen such good recordings—and such significant
material. It was a gold mine for them. . . . The stuff was so good that NSA
wanted more as soon as they could get it."

About a
month later, Arnold and the ship returned for another three weeks on the bottom
of the Sea of Okhotsk, eventually providing NSA with hundreds of additional
tapes. Over the following years, mammoth twenty-foot-long pods were built and
installed on the Okhotsk cable, as well as on one up in the Barents Sea. This
allowed the subs to leave the tap on the cable for up to a year before
returning to recover it. But much of the project was compromised when a former
NSA employee, hurting for money, sold details of the operation to Soviet
intelligence around 1980. Nevertheless, for as long as the tap lasted, NSA was
able to go where no one could have ever dreamed.

At the
height of the cable tapping operation, a new director moved into Room 9A197 in
the Headquarters Building—a director who was thoroughly familiar with the
project long before he arrived at Fort Meade. On the day after Independence
Day, 1977, Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman became the youngest director in NSA's
history.

It had
been a long ride from the tumbleweed hamlet of Rhonesboro, the East Texas town
where Inman grew up. Far from any thoroughfares and absent from most maps,
Rhonesboro was a forgotten backwater halfway between Dallas and the Louisiana
border. Gangly, gap-toothed, Inman seemed out of place in the hardscrabble town
of 200, where his father operated the local Sinclair gasoline station. He soon
found that the best way to keep from becoming a punching bag in the restroom of
Mineola High was to turn his enemies into his protectors. He did this by
ingratiating himself with his bullies, helping them with their homework so they
could squeak by in class. At the same time he curried favor with the school's
social and political elite by helping them in their campaigns for class office.
These were lessons he would long remember.

By the
mid-1970s the fast-rising admiral had been named director of Naval
Intelligence. There, he worked closely with NSA on the cable tapping operation.
He also worked on a highly secret operation to spy on Russian naval activities
south of South Africa. This led him to a long relationship with a shady
American businessman who ran a small company started in a chicken coop behind
his Pennsylvania home.

Named
International Signal and Control, the company was run by James Guerin, who was
anxious to find a way to sell electronic equipment to South Africa. The major
problem with this scheme was the U.S. ban on all economic commerce with South
Africa as a result of that government's apartheid policies. Guerin's solution
was to agree to become a covert agent for Project X, the unoriginal codename
for a questionable joint NSA/Naval Intelligence operation whose purpose was to
help the racist Pretoria government upgrade its secret listening post at its Simontown
naval station, off the Cape of Good Hope. NSA would give the South African
intelligence service superadvanced eavesdropping and optical equipment to spy
on Russian ships and submarines as they transited past the southern tip of
Africa; in return, the U.S. agency would get access to the raw information.

To hide
the shipments of secret equipment to an embargoed nation, a civilian cutout was
needed. That was where Guerin and his ISC came in. But—apparently unbeknownst
to Inman—Guerin had his own agenda. Not only would he act as the conduit to
transship the bugging equipment, he would also use the covert channel to supply
South Africa with desperately needed electronic equipment, providing him with a
tidy profit. Guerin was to work secretly for Inman until 1978.

When Inman
moved into his office on NSA's "Mahogany Row," in July 1977, it was
not his first assignment to the agency. In 1961 he had become an operations
intelligence analyst at the Navy Field Operational Intelligence Office at the
agency. "I was an analyst for thirty-three months looking at the Soviet
Navy as my prime occupation in a complete all-source environment," said
Inman. "That means no category of intelligence were restricted in their
flow for my consideration so long as they dealt with the general topic of the
Soviet Navy. I was watching them at a time when they rarely sent any ships two
hundred miles beyond their waters, and when they did the units frequently broke
down and had to be towed back. By the time I left three years later I had seen
them develop a permanent presence in the Mediterranean and off West Africa, and
they were building a framework for their presence in the Indian Ocean."

Now the
junior analyst had returned as the director, like the prodigal son. "The
idea of going back to be director had always been one of those wishful dreams
that appeared to be unobtainable," Inman recalled. "When I became the
director of Naval Intelligence, which is after I had gotten my first star,
suddenly the prospect that I might be around long enough to get a three-star
job was there. So NSA was clearly top of the list. ... I very much wanted the
NSA job. . . . There had never been any doubt that in my view it was the best
of all the [intelligence] agencies."

To help
bring Inman up to date on the issues affecting NSA, the outgoing director, Lew
Allen, gave him some highly classified reading. An Air Force general, Allen had
been promoted to four-star rank and would shortly take over the Air Force as
Chief of Staff. It was a major reward for guiding the agency through the
various intelligence probes of the mid-1970s.

Among the
documents given Inman to study was one on the problems involved in breaking
Soviet encryption systems. At the time, A Group had not yet achieved its
breakthrough. The document, said Inman, "had all kinds of VRK [Very
Restricted Knowledge—a super-secret NSA classification] restrictions on it. But
it was an extraordinarily thoughtful examination of the A5 problem [A5 was part
of A Group] and the absolute critical role in going forward, finding success in
those areas if the mission was going to be successful."

Looking
out the ninth-floor window on his new empire, Inman quickly began to build a
cadre of loyal spear-carriers. He was looking for what he called "the
water walkers." Those, he said, "who were the people at that stage of
the game who looked to be potential major leaders of the agency." Inman
also began looking for a new deputy director. At the time, Benson K. (Buff)
Buffham, a former deputy chief of operations, held the job, but his term was
almost up. It was widely assumed that Robert E. Drake, the deputy director for
operations, was next in line. Without much enthusiasm, Inman named him to the
post. "I had it in my mind from the beginning," he recalled,
"that about two years for Bob and then time to get on to the next
generation. [But] I was not persuaded that any of them were quite ready ... so
I sort of shocked the place by picking Ann Caracristi. I had watched the job
she had done running A [Group]."

Inman
added, "I decided to go with one more of the World War II generation. Ann
knew that I wanted to be
the
director in a somewhat different role than
in the long years when Lou Tordella had been the deputy [and éminence grise].
She had no problem." Inman also didn't want to see deputy directors
overstaying their time. "I set out to try to get a pattern where deputy
directors did somewhere between two and four years," he said. "I
think [Tordella] stayed too long in the process."

Inman
wanted not just to represent NSA throughout the intelligence community, but
also to run the day-to-day operations, something previous directors had left to
the cryptologic professional, the deputy director. "I had a sense in my
first couple of months that the internal agency's view of the director was sort
of like, Treat him like the pharaoh. Bear him around. Put him down for honors
and ceremonies. Send him off to deal with the outside world and not get very
involved in what went on inside. I am a very hands-on person who likes to get
all over an organization." Inman began walking around and sticking his
head in the various offices—another highly unusual behavior for a director. At
one point he stopped in G Group, which was responsible for the noncommunist
parts of the world. "I walked into G7 spaces on about the fourth of these
visits," he said, "and there was a banner on the wall in case I came.
It said, 'Welcome, Admiral Inman. You will be the first director to visit G7
since General Canine.' "