Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (68 page)

(According
to a former intelligence official involved in nonproliferation issues,
"Ninety percent of what we did we relied on Sigint— ninety percent of
nonproliferation comes through NSA. We get some Humint [human intelligence],
some from the attachés, some from the Israelis—they had a reporting requirement
with us, they had to send us something through the attaché every week to
justify their $5 billion a year.")

Six months
after the summit, intercepts indicated that China was keeping its pledge to
refrain from selling the cruise missiles to Iran. "Recent intelligence
reports suggest Iran is dissatisfied with China's failure to implement existing
ASCM [antiship cruise missile] contracts," said an April 1998 intelligence
report. Nevertheless, Tehran planned one last-ditch effort. Iranian officials
made plans to fly to Beijing on April 15 to air their frustration and discuss
future cooperation. If the trip was ever made, it was of little avail.

With China
having backed out of its contract, Iran turned inward. In December 1998, Iran's
then president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, claimed that Iran had become
"technologically self-sufficient" in missile development.

After
analysts at NSA review intercepts, such as those between Tehran and Microturbo,
they write up reports and send them out to customers. Many of the reports are
stamped with exotic codenames, such as "Gamma," which is reserved for
Sigint of the highest sensitivity. "Within Gamma they had double G, which
was higher than Gamma," said one former official. "Double G material
was sent to people by hand—[Director of Central Intelligence George] Tenet,
[Secretary of State Madeleine] Albright, and so forth. This included material
from friendly-nation wiretaps. 'EG' was Executive Gamma, blue cover
sheet." The analysts also mark reports with a three-letter code indicating
where the intercept was obtained. "FRD," for example, indicates that
the information in the report came from intercepted French diplomatic communications.
"ILC" indicates that it was intercepted from an "international
licensed carrier," such as a commercial telecommunications channel. There
is also a subject tag, such as "ABIG," for "Arms Investigation
of Tracked Vehicles," which indicates that the intercept concerns tracked
weapons vehicles. Thus the analyst need only enter "ABIG" into his
computer and all intercepted messages over the past few days dealing with that
topic would pop up.

The
analysts are searching through the world's private whispers every day, yet after
a while even that becomes routine. "I looked for black-market arms
sales," said one former customer, an analyst for a federal agency. "I
would arrive in the morning, go to my NSA web site— they had a search
engine—pull it down. Keywords were 'letter of credit,' 'contract,' 'bill of
lading,' 'middleman,' 'dealer,' 'broker.' I had eight to ten categories. In
about an hour I would go through all my message traffic [intercepts]. It would
say, 'We searched and we found twenty-seven things that meet your criteria.'
And then you have the subject lines. You click on the subject line and the
message will come up. These will be the reports, you never see the raw
intercepts. It would say something like, 'On the fourteenth of March some
person in the Iranian Ministry of Defense contacted so and so at the embassy in
blah blah. They discussed the following topics.' It would give a description of
the conversation, it would reference other cables on the same issue. And then
if they faxed something—the letters of credit or contracts—they would be in
there."

The
analysts in NSA work, for the most part, in standard cubicles. On their desks
are several computer monitors. As a security measure, the one on which they
read the intercepts is not connected to the outside world. A second computer is
connected to the public Internet, and analysts are forbidden to input
classified material into it, for fear of hackers. Many analysts have
reel-to-reel tape recorders for listening to the intercepted voice
conversations. "They had pictures above their desk of the guys they were
listening to," said one person who spent time in the area. He said that
often such photographs were obtained by intercepting the fax when someone
transmitted a copy of his or her passport in applying for a visa. After
listening to the voices of the same unsuspecting individuals, hour after hour,
day after day, many analysts begin to feel they know them. "They used to
tell me, 'Even if I have never seen these guys, if I ever got on an elevator
and heard their voice I'd jump through the roof. You get to know these voices
as well as your wife's.' "

The
question of whether or not to bring a dèmarche to a foreign government is
always a difficult issue, especially when the discovery of a violation comes
from NSA's Sigint. The State Department is usually in favor of issuing a dèmarche,
but NSA is occasionally opposed because it might reveal to the foreign country
that its communications are being intercepted. "In order to bring a dèmarche
to a foreign country," said one official, "we would first have to get
permission from NSA to declassify or reduce the classification of the
information. They were usually pretty good about it."

The CIA,
however, was a different story. "The Agency [CIA] guys never bothered
telling you what they were doing, if they bothered showing up' at the
meeting," said the official. "The NSA would at least make it usable.
The Agency [CIA] would say, 'You're not to dèmarche this country because we've
got an op going.' We say, 'What's the op?' And they say, 'We can't tell you.'
They never tell you when it's over, unless you follow it up with them. It's
like they almost didn't care, they had other fish to fry. You know
nonproliferation just wasn't important."

Normally,
to hide the source of the underlying information, a certain period of time was
allowed to pass before a dèmarche was issued. "We'd never go in doing this
stuff right away, because they'd know," said one former official.
"We'd have to sit on the stuff for weeks sometimes. And then they'd think
that some guy talked to his girlfriend or blabbed to a hairdresser. You've got
to put time and distance between it."

Through
UKUSA's worldwide eavesdropping web, NSA and its partners were able to peek
behind scenes and determine how well the agreement between the United States
and China was holding up. In the days of the Cold War, "verification"
simply involved photo satellites snapping images, and analysts counting missile
silos and launchers. But today, it is not what is planted in the ground but
what is planted in someone's mind that is critical to know. For that, imaging
satellites are useless and only signals intelligence can provide the answers.
Without Sigint, Washington would have been left in the dark. No other
intelligence source—human, military, diplomatic, photo, Israeli—provided the
answers produced by the Echelon system. (Echelon is a software program whose
name has become a generic term for eavesdropping on commercial communications.)

But the
history of the C-802 problem also shows the dangers associated with Echelon.
Once GCHQ intercepted the fax Microturbo's T. Dècle sent Iran's Heidari, it was
passed on to NSA, the Canadian CSE, and Australia's DSD, as well as to the
British Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) and customs offices. Like most of
the other intercepts dealing with the cruise missile deal, it was not sent to
New Zealand's GCSB, possibly because of continued bitterness over that
country's declaration that it was a nuclear-free zone.

At NSA the
information on Dècle went to W9P3, the Missile Proliferation section of W
Group, the Global Issues and Weapons Group. NSA in turn sent the report on Dècle
to a number of CIA stations around the world, including those in Paris and
Bonn, as well as to the U.S. Commerce Department and to Customs. Thus, within a
few days of Dècle's fax, there were probably hundreds of people in at least
four countries around the world reading it and possibly putting Dècle's name on
some blacklist, as if he were an enemy of the state. The question, however, was
whether the analysts were correct. Was Microturbo sending a missile engine to
Tehran, as they suspected, or was it simply an innocent generator, as France
was claiming? As with many cases in the gray, shadowy world of Echelon, little
is strictly black and white.

To resolve
the issue, French export inspectors flew to Antwerp as the ship containing the
"special items" was preparing to sail to Iran. Upon opening the
crates, they later told U.S. authorities, they confirmed that the "special
items" were generators. This caused U.S. authorities to conduct a
"reevaluation" of the NSA and GCHQ transcripts. In light of the
French information, NSA concluded that some of the intercepted conversations
were more ambiguous than originally believed. They admitted that the equipment
sent by Microturbo in fact could have been a generator, but one with potential
military uses. "It doesn't mean we were necessarily wrong" in the
earlier reports, said one U.S. official. "But if we'd known of the doubts
before, we wouldn't have done things [written the reports] that way."

The
chairman of Microturbo, Jean-Bernard Cocheteux, also flatly denied that the
generator had any usefulness as a missile engine. They were "very
different from engines used to propel missiles," he said, and not useful
in building missile engines. "Microturbo, SA, never assisted Iran in any
way" on any missile, he added.

The issues
involving Dècle are central to the debate over the potential harm caused by
UKUSA's worldwide eavesdropping system. Had he been a citizen of one of the
UKUSA nations, his name would have been deleted before the report was ever sent
out. But because he was not, his name made its way into the computers and
possibly onto the watch lists of intelligence agencies, customs bureaus, and
other secret and law enforcement organizations around the world. It is unknown
with whom those organizations might then have shared the information.

If this
did happen, maybe nothing would come of it, or maybe the next time Dècle tried
to enter the United States or Britain he would be refused without explanation.
Maybe he could even be arrested. Also, after the NSA "reevaluation,"
were the new conclusions casting doubt on the earlier reports sent to everyone
who had received the originals? Or were those recipients left only with the
reports indicating that Dècle and Microturbo were secretly selling a cruise
missile engine to Iran? Complex issues involving innocent non-UKUSA persons,
similar to those raised by the Microturbo intercepts, are likely to occur
hundreds of times a week throughout the UKUSA countries. As government
surveillance technology becomes even more pervasive, the risks to individual
rights grow proportionally.

By 2001,
the UKUSA partners had become an eavesdropping superpower with its own laws,
language, and customs. It operated secret antennas in nearly every corner of
the planet and deep into outer space. Just as mighty navies once ruled the high
seas, UKUSA's goal is to rule cyberspace. On a wall at NSA is a plaque
presented to Kenneth A. Minihan by GCHQ shortly after his arrival as director
in 1996. "Celebrating fifty years of successful partnership," it
says, and then notes the "special relationship" of "the
English-speaking peoples."

In the
late 1990s, for the first time since the in-depth congressional hearings a
quarter of a century earlier, NSA was facing probing questions about its
eavesdropping activities. This time they were coming mostly from European
parliaments, skeptical reporters, and an unusual alliance of left and far-right
groups in the United States. In Europe, the principal concern was the suspicion
that NSA was eavesdropping on business communications and passing on trade
secrets to European firms' American competitors—stealing from Airbus and giving
to Boeing, for example.

Interviews
with dozens of current and former NSA officials indicate that the agency is not
currently engaged in industrial espionage, stealing data from one company and
giving it to a competitor. But there is no law preventing the agency from doing
so, and because its customers, including the White House and the CIA, dictate
NSA's targets, it could conceivably engage in such espionage in the future. The
only prerequisite would be a secret verbal order from the president or the
director of Central Intelligence that industrial espionage was now a national
security requirement. According to information obtained for
Body of Secrets,
something like that came close to happening in 1990, during the
administration of President George Bush.

At the
time, Vice Admiral William O. Studeman was the director of NSA. "There are
a substantial number of legal problems associated— legal and ethical
problems—associated with the concept of trying to provide intelligence
information directly to business in the United States," said Studeman in
1990. "And so I believe that this decision has not yet been made. I
believe that we are going to move in the direction of considering this with
great caution. ... I believe that it's going to be years, and a very slow process
and one that's going to be very deliberate as to what kinds of decisions are
going to be made."

Direction,
said Studeman, would come from above. "We would not be the ones to make
that decision," he said. "I would have to defer to the director of
Central Intelligence and receive his guidance on this particular subject."
The 1990s were a time, said Studeman, when "clearly the area of economics
is now becoming the area of principal concern to the American citizen. This is
being reflected in the polls. More people are concerned about economic
competitiveness than they are concerned about military problems or many other
issues in the world today."