Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (63 page)

When
Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) of the Intelligence Committee said he needed
some secret NSA files, Inman didn't wait to get White House or CIA approval.
"I said, 'Sure,' " Inman recalled, "and sent a guy running off
down to deliver them to Inouye." A short while later, Inman heard from a
boiling Zbigniew Brzezinski, the president's national security adviser.
"Admiral, I understand that you are sending sensitive material to Inouye.
Who authorized that?" he demanded. "I authorized it!" Inman shot
back. "You didn't consult Stan Turner or the secretary of defense?"
asked Brzezinski. "I said, 'It is within my authority and I authorized
it,' " said Inman. "And he hung up." As always, Inman got away
with it and his legend grew within Congress as a man who could be trusted, a
man who got things done.

Administration
officials seldom said no to Inman. When he proposed a budget-busting project,
every effort was made to accommodate him. "What we wanted to do was so
massive that there was no way you could do it within the existing budget,"
he said of one super-expensive Soviet collection project. At the Pentagon,
Secretary of Defense Harold Brown suggested that rather than adding money to
NSA's budget, they cut something. "I told him he couldn't," said
Inman. "That this had to be an augment. That its potential, if it could
ever be successful, had enormous value, primarily for defense." Inman got
his money. "Turner later gave me hell for not having developed it through
him," said Inman, arrogantly adding, "At the time I was polite and
let it just roll off."

Congress
was a cakewalk. Inman briefed the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees and Congressman George Mahon (D—Texas) of the House Appropriations
Committee. "He did not understand a word I said," said Inman,
mockingly. "Then it was just simply, 'Son, if that's [what] you-all think
is what ought to be done, that is just fine. We'll take care of it.' "

At the
CIA, Turner was rapidly becoming worried about NSA's obsession with secrecy and
power. According to Turner, matters had reached the point where the NSA no
longer even trusted the CIA and other members of the intelligence community
with some of its most important information. "My concern was over the
stuff that didn't get out of NSA at all," he said after leaving the CIA.
"They were sitting on it, waiting for a scoop, or saying, 'This is too
sensitive to let out.' "

According
to Turner, Inman was not satisfied with simply overtaking the CIA in espionage,
he also wanted to surpass it in analysis. "The NSA is mandated to collect
intelligence, not analyze it," Turner said. "It must do enough
analysis about what it has collected to decide what to collect next. In intelligence
jargon, this level of analysis is called processing. Processing is regularly
stretched by NSA into full-scale analysis."

Some of
the intelligence NSA released to other American spy agencies, according to
Turner, was so sanitized—stripped of sensitive information—that it was almost
useless. This amounted, he said, "to deliberate withholding of raw
information from the true analytic agencies. NSA wants to get credit for the
scoop." While NSA defended the practice by arguing that it was simply
protecting its supersecret "sources and methods," Turner had a
different view. He said there was no doubt in his mind that NSA regularly and
deliberately drew the curtain in order "to make itself look good rather
than to protect secrets."

In the
NSA-CIA spy war, Inman began having similar complaints about Turner's obsession
with secrecy. During the planning for the elaborate 1980 attempt to rescue the
American embassy employees held hostage by radical Iranian forces in Tehran,
NSA was cut out of the loop. "We weren't getting into the quest for
support or anything else," said Inman. "It turned out that Turner was
providing all the intelligence support for the hostage rescue planning."
In fact, Inman only learned about the planning accidentally, through NSA's own
Sigint. One day someone brought some suspicious intercepted messages up to him.
"I agreed instantly that it had all the connotations of being a U.S.
operation going on, some kind of planning," he recalled. "It was
pretty early."

When the
rescue attempt took place, NSA played a major role, and then it was Turner
complaining that the CIA was being cut out. "When the time came,"
said Inman, "we were able to provide, in a minute-by -minute way, what was
happening to [the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon and] directly to [Secretary of
Defense] Harold Brown, who was sitting over in the White House. And to Turner's
later allegation that he was deliberately cut out of it to diminish his role or
whatever is simply—he had no interest!"

According
to Inman, NSA unwittingly played a role in the mission's eventual failure.
Angered that his agency had been cut out of the planning, Inman warned Air
Force General David C. Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that
NSA had discovered it because of poor communications security procedures.
Shocked, Jones ordered drastic radio silence procedures; he even ordered that
the choppers not be flown until the last minute, so that no stray signal might
be intercepted.

"Jones
was so stunned by the potential of blowing the security at the beginning,"
said Inman, "that he then imposed awesome communications security
constraints and it probably directly impacted on the readiness of the forces.
The fact that the helicopters were put on carriers, sent for five weeks, never
flown until they left the carrier—all of this out of concern that [they] would
be detected in the process ... He was directly driven to it by the impression
made on him [by NSA] that the cat was almost out of the bag because he had not
brought NSA into the process." The radio silence, the lack of pre-mission
helicopter training, and the choppers' condition after they sat unused on the
carrier deck for so long all contributed to the disaster.

Years
later, President Clinton nominated Inman to replace Les Aspin as secretary of
defense. During his speech in the White House Rose Garden accepting the
nomination, Inman stunned many people by making an arrogant reference to a need
to find a "comfort level" with the man who had just nominated him.

But during
the routine background investigation the old rumors about Inman being gay came
up. Inman had denied the rumors to Joel Klein, the White House lawyer assigned
to supervise the background check—the same type of check performed when he went
to NSA. But Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos was worried. "If the rumors
of Inman's being gay could be proved true, there was no way he'd be confirmed
as secretary of defense," he said. "He'd get hit from both sides: by
conservatives who believed that homosexuality was a disqualifying condition and
by gay-rights advocates who would argue, justifiably, that it was hypocritical
to have a homosexual defense secretary when gays and lesbians were prohibited
from serving openly in the military."

Suddenly
Inman had a confession. "When the president was first considering my
appointment," he told Klein over the telephone from his vacation cabin in
Vail, "I told you only ninety percent of the truth. Here's the other
ten." Although still denying that he was gay, he disclosed parts of his
private life that he had kept from the initial background check. "Had we
known the full story a month earlier, the president would not have chosen
Inman," said Stephanopoulos. "Once the Senate investigators finished
digging through Inman's life, everything would be public, and Inman would not
be confirmed."

Strobe
Talbott, one of Inman's most ardent supporters, called the White House to argue
the admiral's case. He said that Inman had explained away the concealed
behavior as "a way to get attention." "The rest of us rolled our
eyes," said Stephanopoulos. "Then Joel told Talbott about his most
recent conversation with Inman. Even if you made the dubious assumption that
Inman's private life would remain private during the confirmation process, we
had a problem: the fact that Inman had misled the White House."

The
decision was to dump him, fast. But because Inman had deliberately placed
Clinton in an embarrassing position, the responsibility was on him to make a
graceful exit. "The only option was for him to withdraw quietly, but the
flinty and flighty admiral wasn't ready for that," said Stephanopoulos.
Instead, Inman decided to go out blaming everyone but himself for his problems.
He did it in a live television news conference the likes of which no one had
ever seen before. Over an hour peppered with rambling accusations, Inman
charged that he was the victim of a "new McCarthyism," that Senator
Bob Dole and the columnist William Safire had conspired against him, and that
he had been the target of "hostile" press coverage. To
Stephanopoulos, Inman looked "like a man who was broadcasting instructions
transmitted through the fillings in his teeth."

Rather
than admit he had been dumped, Inman later tried to make it sound like he never
really wanted the job in the first place. "I'm arrogant," he said.
"And I've got a temper. And people are probably right when they say I
should have a thicker skin. But I was pissed off. . . . Hell, I didn't want the
job in the first place. The dumb decision was accepting."

Named on
March 10, 1981, to fill Inman's chair at NSA was his old friend Lincoln D.
Faurer, a fifty-three-year-old Air Force lieutenant general with gray hair and
a buzz cut. A native of Medford, Massachusetts, Faurer graduated from West
Point and spent most of his career carrying out intelligence and strategic
reconnaissance assignments, commanding RB-47s in the 1950s, and taking over a
surveillance squadron on the frigid Aleutian island of Shemya during the late
1960s. During the 1970s, Faurer served variously as the director of
intelligence for the U.S. Southern Command; Air Force deputy assistant Chief of
Staff for Intelligence; vice director for production at the Defense
Intelligence Agency; director of intelligence at the U.S. European Command; and
deputy chairman of the NATO Military Committee.

When
Faurer arrived, Crypto City was undergoing the largest construction boom in its
history. The enormous building program was adding a million square feet to his
headquarters/operations complex, at a cost of $150 million, plus another
million square feet with new buildings for the Technology and Systems
Organization and other facilities. Under President Reagan, money for the spy
world would flow as if from a faucet with the handle broken off. Fat times were
coming to NSA.

Unlike
Inman, Faurer was determined to keep out of the spotlight; he began rebuilding
the agency's wall of anonymity. Speaking to a group of NSA retirees, he gave
them a not-so-subtle warning to forever keep their mouths shut. "Leaks are
not the answer," he scolded. "They are dangerous, destructive, and
inexcusable. Both the source and user of leaked classified information should
be met with public disapprobation, and media judgment in disclosing
intelligence accomplishments should be criticized. If free speech and free
press are to remain the cornerstone of our society, given the growing strength
of our adversary, 'free' must not be synonymous with 'irresponsible.' " He
then quoted George Washington: " 'The necessity for procuring good intelligence
is apparent and need not be further urged—all that remains for me to add is
that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible.' "

Blunt,
lacking Inman's tact and charisma as well as his many friends in Congress,
Faurer was allegedly pushed out the door. After four years in office, the
general was due to retire in August 1985. But over the previous winter he had
become embroiled in a major budget fight. In order to divert money to NSA, the
Pentagon, and the rest of the intelligence community, Reagan dammed up the flow
to many social programs. Angered at the rising federal budget deficits and
worried about their impact on the 1986 congressional elections, Democrats and
many Republicans lit a fire under the administration to cut back on defense spending.
In response, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger began targeting a number
of programs for cuts. High on his agenda was placing NSA's overweight frame on
a diet.

But Faurer
would have none of it. He believed that NSA's Crypto City should continue its
rapid growth, not slow down. At the same time, Faurer wanted still another new
building constructed in NSA's city to house the National Cryptologic School,
which was located at its annex a few miles away. Speaking to former NSA
employees in 1982, he boasted how well NSA was doing. "The health of the
Agency is great," he said. "There's no question about that . . . and
can get nothing but greater." He then went on to complain of the need for
even more space and people. He pointed out that in 1960, only about 35 percent
of NSA office space was occupied by computers and other equipment but that now
the figure had almost doubled, to 65 percent. "You can imagine what that
does for crowding people in," he protested. "It has left us with a
significant workspace problem." Despite all the new construction going on
and planned for the future, Faurer said only that Congress had been
"somewhat" responsive.

He also
blasted those in the Congress and the Pentagon who were attempting to slow down
the growth of his secret city. In particular, he pointed to what he called the
"negative impact" of "budget constraints," especially the
cutback in analysts. "The analysts' numbers have been excessively drawn
down," he said, "the scope of their target unwisely narrowed, their
confidence eroded by uninformed criticism, and the language of their judgments
too often hedged against the inevitable cry of 'intelligence failure.' "