Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (74 page)

By 1998,
however, agency officials were discovering that many companies that early on
claimed to be Y2K compliant were suddenly retracting their words. "In some
cases," said one NSA report, "the Agency may not know there is a
problem until something breaks." Said Minihan: "Solving the Y2K
problem is a tedious job and we are fighting a battle against a deadline that
will not move under any circumstances."

As the
date approached, the systems governing the agency's thousands of computers were
assessed and stickers were placed on the terminals. A green "Y2K OK"
sticker indicated that the system would pass over the threshold without
problem; a yellow sticker marked systems concerning which there was still some
question, and a red sticker warned, "Y2K NOT OK."

Less than
a year before the critical date, NSA was still behind schedule. Only 19 percent
of the agency's computers were ready, and repairs on nearly 60 percent were
late. But as a result of a crash program, computer programmers managed to bring
94 percent of the computers into compliance by July 1999. The remaining 6
percent were expected to be ready by the end of September. Ultimately, as in
most of the world, the millennium's arrival caused little or no disruption to
NSA's powerful computers and software; the agency continued to eavesdrop as
though nothing had happened. Until January 24.

Finally,
after the agency spent thousands of staff hours and more than $3 million on
repairs, the system was patched together. After three days, NSA awoke from its
electronic coma, its memory still intact. "We had the ability to store
that which we collected over this three-and-a-half-day period," said
Hayden. "When we were able to go back and process the information when
that capability came back, it took eight to twelve hours to process and analyze
the information that we had collected." During the outage, much of
intercept traffic that would have normally gone to NSA shifted instead to GCHQ.
"We covered the whole thing for them," said one GCHQ official,
"to their acute embarrassment."

A year
after the crash, with computer management now more centralized, NSA's brain was
again functioning normally, at about 12 to 15 percent of capacity.
Nevertheless, Hayden concluded, "The network outage was a wake-up call to
our stakeholders and us that we can no longer afford to defer the funding of a new
infrastructure. And the challenge doesn't stop there."

With his
pudgy face, rimless glasses, and hairless dome, Hayden more closely resembled a
John Le Carr
é
spymaster
than an Ian Fleming secret agent. He also lacked the background of the
stereotypical super-high-tech spy chief. Shortly after his arrival on the
eighth floor of OPS 2B, he told his staff that arithmetic had never been his
best subject. "I'll state right up front," he admitted, "I am
not a mathematician or a computer scientist and I won't pretend to be one. I
will be relying heavily on all of you who are." To make the point, he
added, "When I think about the intellectual and mathematical brainpower
that comes to work here every day, I can recall the same intimidating feeling I
experienced as a child when Mrs. Murphy introduced me to the times tables in
the second grade."

Born on
March 17, 1945, Hayden grew up in Pittsburgh. In college and graduate school at
Duquesne University he avoided hard math and science courses and instead
studied history. During the height of the antiwar era, the late 1960s, Hayden
excelled in ROTC, becoming a Distinguished Graduate of the program. He entered
the Air Force in 1969, shortly after finishing his master's degree in history,
and was assigned as a briefer at Strategic Air Command headquarters at Offutt
Air Base in Omaha, Nebraska. Two years later he was assigned to Guam as chief
of current intelligence for the headquarters of the 8th Air Force. He spent the
last half of the 1970s at various schools, mostly teaching ROTC at St.
Michael's College in rural Vermont.

In June
1980 Hayden, newly promoted to major, was sent to Osan Air Base in South Korea
as chief of intelligence for a tactical fighter wing. Two years later it was
back to the good life again, as a student and then, in Sofia, Bulgaria, as air attaché.
From there Hayden moved into a policy job in the Pentagon and then over to the
Bush White House, on the National Security Council, until 1991. After an
intelligence assignment at U.S. European Command Headquarters in Germany, he
took over the Air Intelligence Agency and became director of the Joint Command
and Control Warfare Center at Kelly Air Force Base, Texas. There he became
heavily involved in the concept of information warfare. Finally he was made deputy
chief of staff for the United Nations Command in South Korea, where he dealt
with the issue of missing servicemen from the Korean War.

Hayden was
in Korea when he secretly received word of his new assignment to NSA. Shortly
afterward, on a Friday night, he went to the base movie theater with his wife.
Playing was a film he had not heard of,
Enemy of the State,
in which
Will Smith plays an average citizen eavesdropped on by NSA, and Gene Hackman
plays a retired NSA official worried about the agency's enormous power.

"Other
than the affront to truthfulness," said Hayden, "it was an
entertaining movie. And I will tell you, I walked out of there saying, you know,
that's not a good thing, to portray an agency so inaccurately. But I'm not too
uncomfortable with a society that makes its bogeymen secrecy and power. That's
really what the movie's about—it was about the evils of secrecy and power. Then
they tacked NSA on, that was the offensive part. But making secrecy and power
the bogeymen of political culture, that's not a bad society."

When
Hayden arrived at Crypto City, it was under siege. Congress was lobbing mortar
rounds. Morale was lower than a buried fiber optic cable. Senior managers had
become "warlords," locked in endless internecine battles. "The
term 'warlordism' has been going around for years," said one NSA official.
"It means that each deputy director acts like a feudal warlord in a
fiefdom. He will not give up anything for the greater glory of the NSA mission.
If we have something that requires taking some of my stuff and putting in
another deputy directorate, I won't do it. It's like rearranging the deck
chairs on the
Titanic.
The directors are, by and large, afraid to tell
the deputy directors to leave. They feel perhaps unsure of themselves."
The deputies, he added, "tend to stake areas out like dogs marking their
territory."

Another
problem was that the Senior Policy Council, which advised the director on major
issues affecting NSA, comprised so many feuding "warlords" that to
reach agreement on anything was impossible. "I don't know how anything
gets done," said one member of the council. "There are thirty-five of
us in that room and we don't get anything done. Anybody who was anybody was on
the damn leadership team. It was impossible for the director to get a consensus
on anything."

Hayden
also arrived to find the agency's financial system in shambles. "The
budget is one of his biggest problems," said an official in January 2000.
"He doesn't know where it is, he can't account for it, that's what's
driving him nuts." Adding to the management problems were the enormous
technical challenges facing the agency at the dawn of the new century.

Hayden
candidly admitted that at stake was nothing less than the survival of NSA.
"As an agency, we now face our greatest technological and analytic
challenges—diverse and dynamic targets; nontraditional enemies and allies; a
global information technology explosion; digital encryption; and others. Make
no mistake, we are in a worldwide competition for our future."

Hayden had
been at NSA less than a year when the computer crash came. It likely confirmed
the worst predictions he had been hearing about his agency's failing health.
"The NSA used to have the best computers in the world, bar none,"
said an official who had been briefed on the crash. "Now they can't even
keep them running. What does that tell you? Do you know a modern company that
goes off-line for four days? They're struggling."

The agency
that once blazed the trail in computer science, going where the private sector
feared to go or could not afford to go, was now holding on to technology's tail
for dear life. "Most of what they were expert in is no longer
relevant," said a former director. "Getting them to embrace the new
world has been traumatic. . . . All they're trying to do is hang on and
survive." Florida congressman Porter J. Goss, one of those who did see the
computer crash coming, was more blunt. "Believe me," he said,
"it's patch, patch, patch out there. We no longer are capable of doing
what we used to do." Goss also said, "This should have come as a
surprise to no one. Indeed, the [House Intelligence] Committee has, for at
least three years, warned NSA and the intelligence community of concerns in
these areas."

"Signals
intelligence is in a crisis," said House Intelligence Committee staff
director John Millis more than a year before NSA's crash. Like a worried first
mate seizing the ship's wheel from a captain who is headed for the shoals, the
committee began forcing change on NSA. Both Millis and Goss had served for
about a dozen years in the CIA's Operations Directorate. Millis had also spent
some time in the executive offices of NSA. Now the two teamed up to
reinvigorate NSA's sensitive Sigint operations.

"We
have been living in the glory days of Sigint over the last fifty years, since
World War II," said Millis. "Sigint has been and continues to be the
'int' of choice of the policymaker and the military commander. They spend about
four or five times as much on it as they do on clandestine collection, and the
fact of the matter is, it's there quickly when needed. It's always there. Or it
has always been there. In the past, technology has been the friend of NSA, but
in the last four or five years technology has moved from being the friend to
being the enemy of Sigint."

In the
past, a major communications revolution—telephone, radio, television,
satellite, cable—might happen at most once every generation. The predictable
pace gave NSA time to find new ways to tap into each medium, especially since
many of the scientists behind the revolutions also served on NSA's secret
Scientific Advisory Board. Today, however, technological revolutions—PCs, cell
phones, the Internet, e-mail—take place almost yearly and NSA's secret advisers
no longer have a monopoly on the technologies. "Increasingly," said
Mike Mc-Connell, the NSA's director from 1992 to early 1996, "we will have
to deal with a much more diverse electronic environment, cluttered not only
with human communications and sensor signals, but also with machines
speaking
to other machines."

One major
problem confronting NSA is a change in the use of technologies throughout the
world. Some of NSA's targets still use traditional methods of communications—unencrypted
faxes and phone calls, transmitted over microwaves and satellites. As can be
seen from the intercepts surrounding Iran's attempt to acquire the C-802
missile, NSA is still very capable of performing its mission on these
technologies. But other targets are switching to far more complex
communications systems—circuit encryption, fiber optics, digital cellular
phones, and the Internet. The problem is to spend the vast amounts of money,
time, and expertise needed to develop ways to penetrate the new systems, and
yet not to overlook the old ones.

"We've
got to do both," said Hayden, sitting in his office. He had walked into
the middle of the problem when he joined the agency. "Do more without
giving up what you used to do. . . . Part of the world looks like this now and
is moving hell bent for leather in that direction, but in this different part
of the world it still looks like it did fifteen years ago. And things of
interest are happening to the United States in both universes. . . . How do you
do the new while the old is still important to you—in a budget that doesn't
allow you to create two Sigint systems, one for the old, one for the new?
You've captured the precise dilemma of this agency."

Deputy
Director Barbara McNamara outlined in stark numbers another of NSA's key
problems today: too much communication. "Forty years ago there were five
thousand stand-alone computers, no fax machines, and not one cellular phone.
... In 1999 there were over 420 million computers, most of them networked.
There were roughly 14 million fax machines and 468 million cell phones and
those numbers continue to grow. The telecommunications industry is investing a
trillion dollars to encircle the world in millions of miles of high bandwidth
fiber-optic cable." McNamara might have added that there were also 304
million people with Internet access in 2000—up 80 percent from just the year
before. And for the first time, less than half of those people live in North
America.

Not only
is NSA spreading itself thin attempting to listen in on ever-expanding modes of
communications, the tasks assigned to it by the White House, CIA, Pentagon, and
other customers are also exploding. In 1995, the agency received about 1,500
"immediate" requests for intelligence—known as
ad hoc requirements.
By the fall of 2000, the number of such requests had already grown to
3,500—a 170 percent increase. Analysts, said one senior NSA official,
"brute force" their way through massive amounts of information.

The
problem is not just interception of ever-increasing quantities of
communications, it is moving the information back to NSA. "Well, what are
all these communications you're going to bring back to the building and
process?" asked a senior intelligence official involved in Sigint.
"You've got to have a pipeline to bring them back. You've got to have
bandwidth, which is expensive, and which is limited. It's finite. You can't
just get all the bandwidth in the world and ship everything back here. So
you've got a physics problem. . . . You've got to get a real big pipe and there
is no such big pipe that exists."