Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (65 page)

For a time
during the late 1970s, as NSA was celebrating its enormous success with
satellite eavesdropping, the CSE was becoming a dinosaur. The more satellites
circled the earth, transmitting rivers of intercepted data, the less NSA
depended on the CSE ground stations sweeping in over-the-pole signals from the
Soviet Union. At the same time, the CSE's codebreaking organization, O1
Division, was on life support. Much of the information was still being
processed by hand. Only one person, Ed Cheramy, truly qualified as a cryptanalyst,
and even he worked only on ancient, manual systems. When he died in early 1981,
CSE effectively went out of the codebreaking business for a time. The agency's
computer setup was primitive. According to Canadian documents, CSE's targets
"had become very sophisticated and difficult to analyze" and its
cryptanalytic department "had a poor reputation as a dead end, being
unproductive." In the words of one insider, O1 "had become obsolete
and unreliable."

Thus, in
early 1980 a decision was made to bring the organization back to life. New
blood was pumped in. In 1979, Peter Hunt, formerly the CSE liaison officer to
NSA, had taken over as director general of production, replacing Jack Dornan,
who had held the job since way back in the late 1950s. Within a year, Hunt was
named chief of the entire CSE. As a first step he reached out to NSA for help,
sending down one of his organization's most gifted scientists, Thomas Johnston,
who held a Ph.D. in physics and was a dynamo with advanced math. Johnston
returned with an expensive prescription. It called for aggressive hiring of
mathematicians expert in such esoteric fields as stochastic and Markov
processes, shift register, and polynomial theory. The entire cryptanalytic
staff needed to be rebuilt, and a powerful supercomputer was required. At the
time, CSE's Sigint database was loaded on IBM 370 mainframes, and obsolete
PDP-8 and PDP-11 computers were used for linguistic analysis.

The
multimillion-dollar price tag for the supercomputer was resisted by the budget
office. Nevertheless, Johnston continued to argue his case. (In the meantime,
he managed to convert one of the IBM computers into a codebreaking machine able
to supply him with the critical daily key on a
foreign cipher system he
had been attacking.) At first Johnston pushed for the purchase of a $3
million—$5 million Control Data Corporation Cyber 740, largely because NSA was
also considering buying one. Eventually, however, NSA went with the newer, more
expensive Cray X-MP and Johnston was forced to plead for even more money to
keep up.

Faced with
what NSA calculated was "a 40-year catch-up" in computer
cryptanalysis, the Canadian government finally bit the bullet and approved the
purchase of a slimmed-down Cray, the X-MP/11 (modified). It cost $12,082,000 (Canadian)
with the required Cray maintenance contract and instantly became the most
powerful computer in the country.

The mighty
machine was set up in an expansive, air-filtered computer center. At beige
terminals, sixteen cryptanalysts tapped out complex questions while their
mechanical wizard quietly crunched numbers, spitting out results in illionths
of a second. Instructing the whirring brain was an NSA Sigint software package,
the Folklore operating system. NSA also trained a number of Canadian cryptanalysts
and computer operators in the Cray's use.

Catching
up in cryptology was an expensive undertaking. By 1994, the CSE had spent a
whopping $34 million (Canadian) on the X-MP alone. Over the 1980s, it has been
estimated, the modernization of CSE cost upwards of $100 million. By 2001, the
staff had grown to about 900, upping the annual budget to $98 million. Adding
to the cost was a new twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week Canadian
Sigint Operations Center (CANSOC).

Much of
the collection is done by intercept operators attached to the Supplementary
Radio System, whose headquarters are at Tunney's Pasture, in Ottawa. Among the
CSE's listening posts are those located at Canadian Forces Station (CFS)
Leitrim, just south of Ottawa in Ontario. Its antenna farm includes four large
satellite dishes, and it listens to diplomatic communications in and out of
Ottawa. At its Gander, Newfoundland, post the CSE has a giant elephant-cage
antenna and concentrates mostly on naval intercepts. The Gander listening post
is connected with NSA's worldwide Bullseye high-frequency direction-finding
network. Several others are largely operated remotely. These include Alert on
Ellesmere Island in the Northwest Territories, which for decades has monitored
Russian over-the-pole communications, and CFS Masset in British Columbia, which
also has a giant elephant-cage antenna.

Among
CSE's targets are such allies as Japan, South Korea, and Mexico. As at NSA,
trade intelligence has become a big priority. During negotiations leading up to
the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement, CSE intercept operators were very
busy. "They spied on the Mexican trade representative during the NAFTA
negotiations," said Jane Shorten, a former CSE linguist. "I just
remember seeing those summaries. I know my colleagues who were Spanish
linguists were working really hard at that, doing extra hours." Under
Project Aquarian, Shorten monitored South Korean diplomatic reaction to
meetings with Canadian trade officials about the CANDU nuclear reactor. She also
eavesdropped on communications in and out of the South Korean Embassy in
Ottawa.

"Knowledge
is power," said Liberal Member of Parliament Derek Lee. "When we as
Canadians sit down with another country to negotiate an agreement, our
negotiators must be possessed of as much knowledge as they can get their hands
on. There isn't a country in the world that wouldn't do that."

While the
Canadians may be the new kids on the block when it comes to signals
intelligence, the British virtually invented Sigint—hundreds of years before
signals even came along. As early as the Elizabethan period, at least a few
people in England knew that the Crown secretly read everyone's mail. In
Stratford, a place of gentle green hills and straw-thatched cottages along the
Avon, William Shakespeare mentioned the practice in
Henry V:

The King has note of all that they
intend,

By interception which they dream
not of.

During
World War II, the cryptanalytic activities of both Britain and the United
States reached their zenith with the breaking of the Enigma, Fish, and Purple
cipher machines. Following the war, to obscure the purpose of the burgeoning
codebreaking organization, all references to cryptology were dropped from its
name. Thus the Government Code and Cypher School became the Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). About the same time, Bletchley Park was
turned into a training center and GCHQ moved to the Cotswolds. There in
Cheltenham, among medieval villages of stone cottages and endless fields, GCHQ
built its sprawling headquarters in 1953.

Among the
differences between NSA and GCHQ for many years was unionization. Codebreakers,
intercept operators, and others at GCHQ were allowed to join unions and even
engage in brief work stoppages. That came to an end in 1984 when Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher used her iron fist to ban the unions. Much of the pressure to
deunionize GCHQ came from the United States.

On
February 23, 1979, in a little-noticed action, a few hundred members of two
civil service unions walked out for the day in support of a pay hike, briefly
halting long-term analysis of intercepted messages. Then, in December 1979,
after the Russians invaded Afghanistan, intercept operators began a
"work-to-rule" action that limited the degree to which GCHQ could
eavesdrop on Soviet tank and troop movements. Work-to-rule meant that intercept
operators would do such things as tune their receiver to exactly the frequency
of the desired target and not move from that frequency even though the signal
might drift slightly to either side.

Because
NSA always has a sizable number of its own personnel working at GCHQ, the
agency immediately became aware of the action. For the director of GCHQ, Sir
Brian Tovey, it was extremely embarrassing. He ended up apologizing to NSA's then
director, Bobby Ray Inman, for his agency's poor performance. "It made us
look ridiculous," he recalled. "That was the turning point for me.
From that time onwards, there was always an undercurrent of worry in some part
of the office. It might be the radio [intercept] operators this week, the
communications officers the next, and the computer operators the week after,
but there was always something one was trying to contain."

"Some
sixty percent of the GCHQ radio [intercept] operators obeyed the call to work
to rule," said one GCHQ supervisor, "creating such great damage to
communications intelligence information that a major row erupted between GCHQ
and NSA, with the latter threatening to terminate the UKUSA Agreement and
withdraw all financial assistance and exchange of intelligence." He added,
"NSA's faith in GCHQ's ability to deliver the goods was on the wane."

Tovey saw
trouble ahead. In the spring of 1981, he said, the unions made it
"brutally clear" that they now regarded GCHQ as an attractive
target—"a damn good place to hit." He added, "Hitting GCHQ
doesn't hit the public, but it does bother and embarrass HMG [Her Majesty's
Government]."

In 1980,
GCHQ intercept operators at one listening post had conducted a work-to-rule
slowdown just at the time the Soviet Union was heavily involved in Afghanistan,
causing a great deal of teeth-gnashing at NSA. As a result, Tovey wrote a
classified letter to the staffers who had caused the disruption. "I was
able to spell out the consequences of their action and the considerable anxiety
it had caused to some of our customers and our major allies," he said.

The most
serious job action took place on March 8, 1981, during a critical period when
there were numerous major international events taking place. These included the
assassination attempt on President Reagan in Washington and a call for a
national strike by the Solidarity union in Poland. At GCHQ, the unions called
for a one-day strike and then mounted "selective disruptive action"
at a number of the agency's listening posts around the world. "The massive
response to the strike call by intercepting personnel rendered a number of the
intelligence gathering stations completely inoperable for more than a
week," said one GCHQ supervisor. "This lost not only the current
intelligence available through interception, but deprived the organization of
information necessary for the reception of valuable information for months
ahead."

According
to Tovey, it became essential that actions at one of those monitoring stations
be halted immediately "for the most vital security reasons." But when
a senior GCHQ official pleaded with a union official to call off the work
stoppage at that station, explaining in vague terms the nature of the threat,
the union official replied bluntly, "You are telling me where I'm hurting
Mrs. Thatcher."

Thus when
Tovey told the NSA director shortly after the incident that he was going to get
the unions banned, Inman smiled and exclaimed, "That's marvelous."
"We do not interfere with each other," said Tovey. "But having
said that, the Americans could not be unconcerned if a major partner fell down
on the job. We noticed a reluctance to enter into work-sharing and we read this
as a message. It was the beginning of a reluctant feeling that 'Oh Lord, we
don't know whether we can rely on the Brits.'.. . They had always been puzzled
by the presence of unions. They have a cast-iron organization at the NSA. If
anyone goes on strike there they get the sack. We used to have to tell them:
'We've had to drop this because of industrial unrest; could you pick it up for
us?' The Americans found this bizarre."

Arguing to
Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee that unions should be banned at GCHQ,
Tovey asserted that their past actions had put "unfair stress on the
Americans" and that the tempo of union disruptions was increasing. Once
Thatcher approved the recommendation, buff-brown envelopes appeared on
employees' desks explaining the order. "Some people went white," said
one GCHQ worker, "some people started to giggle. You could say they were
in a mild state of clinical shock." To protest the action, the Trades
Union Congress paid for an advertisement in a London tabloid. "At
GCHQ," it said, "the Government listens to everyone except the people
who work there."

The worry
that NSA might someday distance itself from GCHQ has had a major impact on the
British organization, never more than during the 1982 war with Argentina over
the Falkland Islands. At that point, the British government realized how much
they relied on NSA for help with Sigint. "Dependence is total," said
one official. One report indicated that NSA broke the Argentine code and that
as much as 98 percent of the intelligence on Argentina's naval and military
movements came from NSA. "We can ask the Americans to do things,"
said one former official, "but we cannot compel them. There may be targets
they don't want to cover."

As a
result of this worry, the British government in 1983 gave secret approval for a
massive undertaking, the development of their own Sigint satellite, codenamed
Zircon. GCHQ originally recommended the project to the Ministry of Defence as
far back as the early 1970s, following the success of NSA's Rhyolite program.
But they were constantly turned down until 1983, after the Falklands War.