Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (76 page)

As
communications shift from satellites to fiber optics, NSA may have to return to
tapping undersea cables—if it hasn't already done so. But now, instead of
copper cables connecting parts of Russia, the targets may be major commercial
WDM fiber optic cables connecting continents. And instead of the USS
Halibut,
the new cable-tapping submarine may be the USS
Jimmy Carter,
called
the most advanced spy sub ever built, which is due to be completed in 2004. In
December 1999, Electric Boat was awarded a $887 million contract by the Navy to
extensively modify the
Jimmy Carter
for "surveillance, mine
warfare, special warfare, payload recovery and advanced communications."
When completed, said a source quoted in the
Los Angeles Times,
the
Seawolf-class sub "will be able to place and recover top-secret 'pods'
that will tap undersea fiber-optic cables for the first time."

To cope
with what Michael Hayden referred to as "the massive volume of stuff"
flowing into NSA every day, the agency plans to "move processing more
forward in our process so that you're not moving raw unprocessed stuff—so much
so far."

That may
mean giving more responsibility to NSA's three large Regional Sigint Operations
Centers (RSOCs). The Medina RSOC, located at Medina Annex in Lackland, Texas,
focuses on the Caribbean and on Central and South America. The second, in an
underground bunker at Kunia, Hawaii, focuses on Asia. And the third, at Fort
Gordon, Georgia, processes and analyzes intercepts from Europe and the Middle
East. Manned jointly by NSA and its three military Sigint organizations, the
RSOCs were set up to consolidate on U.S. territory much of the intercept
activity that was previously done at the scores of worldwide listening posts.
Much of the Sigint flowing into these centers comes from satellites and
remotely operated stations.

Another
problem created by the rapid changes in worldwide communications technology is
how to design the newest Sigint satellites to target these systems. The
enormously expensive eavesdropping birds may be programmed in 2001 for a system
or technology that becomes obsolete by 2003. "We spend more money on one
satellite in one year than we do on all the analytic capabilities
combined," said John Millis. "It doesn't make a lot of sense doing
Sigint from there anymore. Excepting Elint, you shouldn't be spending one
dollar more than we do to try and intercept communications—regular voice and
data-type communications—from space. But we do make that investment. This is
something that we think that we have to move away from." The change in
philosophy is revolutionary in an agency that, since the late 1950s, has moved
nonstop toward space.

Because of
the change, there have been repeated delays in completing the next generation
of NSA satellites, called Integrated Overhead Signals Intelligence
Architecture—2 (IOSA-2), while experts attempt to decide which collection
systems would be best. Originally the National Reconnaissance Office, which
builds NSA's satellites, said the new Sigint constellation—a constellation is
several satellites operating in concert—would be defined by the end of 1999 and
acquisition would begin about 2002. But now it appears that because of
"the magnitude of the job," the first systems will not be operational
before 2010.

These are
all areas where the House Intelligence Committee is attempting to throw NSA a
financial life buoy. "NSA now faces new, more robust challenges, thanks to
the explosion of the technology and telecommunications industries," said
its chairman, Porter Goss, in 2000.  "Each type of communications—radio,
satellite, microwave, cellular, cable—is becoming connected to all the others.
Each new type of traffic shows up on every type of communication.
Unfortunately, as the global network has become more integrated, NSA's culture
has evolved so that it is seemingly incapable of responding in an integrated
fashion." Tim Sample, who became staff director on Millis's death in June
2000, minced no words in a talk to a group at NSA. He made it clear that for
years NSA's leadership had simply ignored the agency's many problems. Some on
the House Intelligence Committee have been especially critical of Barbara
McNamara, a member of the agency's old school, who was deputy director up until
June 2000 and is now NSA's liaison officer to England. "There was an
attitude of, We'll do it ourselves, thank you very much," said Sample.
"We understand that there are some changes, but we've been doing pretty
well with what we've been doing, thank you. We'll keep going." Sample
assessed NSA's management problems harshly:

When it
came to Sigint, we turned to NSA and we got a lot of resistance. There was an
issue of financial accountability, and that was at best elusive. There was a
sense of protecting fiefdoms—and again we understand, we were hunkering down
here, for God sake, Congress is coming, don't let them cut us again. We saw
multiple efforts at projects throughout the organization that in some cases
were duplicative, and were done more in the sense of the bureaucracy is not
quite working for me, I'll do it internal to my organization and that way
something might get done. Or there was a sense of ownership within each
organization.

We saw, we
believe, that the agency was too insular. It was that sense of we can do
everything internally. It was a sense of protection of people—which isn't bad,
as long as it's mixed with what kind of people do you need for the future. What
skill mix do you need to have. And then you help your workforce get there.

From a
management standpoint, we saw a major protection of bureaucracy. Many managers,
especially at the more senior levels, didn't accept the writing on the wall.
Not just the Congressional writing on the wall, but the intelligence, the
target writing on the wall. That somehow in our view, some of the management
lost touch with the workforce. And one of the most rewarding things I think
I've seen in the last four or five years is, if you dive down into the
workforce, the young people that have gotten into this game. They have the same
infection that almost all of us have had when we started our careers in
intelligence. It's a sense of patriotism, it's a sense of accomplishment, it's
a sense of protecting national security. And many of them, we thought—and not
just NSA but other agencies—were scratching their heads trying to figure out
where are we going? And that was important to us. So we're on a defensive
posture instead of an offensive one.

There
was—and I know I'll probably get a lot of people upset at this one—but there
really was a philosophy of feel better. Let's do some things to feel better
about where we are. And one of those areas was—without taking swipes at it,
because it was important—but one of the areas that was
emphasized was management awards. And I'm fully
supportive of rewarding people and of having agencies rewarded for their
efforts, of how they manage people and how they manage organizations and how
they do things. It is an important part of life. It is an important part of
human value. It is not
the
most important part of intelligence. But
that's not the feeling that we had. We got the feeling that that was a big
priority.

And if you
think I'm making this up, let me tell you one of the phone calls that I got,
that I will never, ever, forget. And I will not tell you who called me. I will
just tell you that this individual was at the senior levels of NSA. And we were
about to produce a bill, and we were about to send it out the door, and I got a
phone call one morning—and this individual said, "Tim, whatever you write,
would you do me a favor and not put it in the public bill." And I said,
"Why? It's unclassified." And the response was, "Because we're
in line for some management awards and if the media sees that, it may ruin that
opportunity." To us, that spoke volumes. To us that said that many of the
managers, including the senior managers, were not quite with the picture, in our
view.

And what
we said basically was we see a lot of management and very little leadership.
And there is a major difference. And we said that we saw a lot of people trying
to do a lot of good work, but that Sigint in the future was in peril. And they
were fairly harsh words, and they got a lot of people upset, though my sense is
for those in the workforce, there was a lot of head shaking up and down, going,
Yeah, how do we fix this. And I will say this now, and I will say it again and
again, the issue here was facing change.

Asked in
2000 whether he believed Congress was attempting to micromanage NSA—take over
command of his ship—Hayden was diplomatic. "Not Congress," he said.
"We have occasionally skirmishes with particular staffers, and those are
honest differences of opinions. I've got a natural inclination to think they're
too detailed. We have a fair amount of attention from Congress. . . . That's a
good thing. What I communicate to the workforce is: that says that what we do
is important, they're paying attention.

"Now
the dark side of that is they may have views on some things that we're doing
that we don't totally agree with. We'll get over it. The important thing is
that they care, and actually I have used that with the workforce. I say we
occasionally get the harsh words from our overseers. Even when it's the harsh
word—I'll tell you the exact metaphor I used. You're watching somebody's kids
playing down the street a little bit out of sight, and they're soaping
somebody's car windows. You kind of get a little smile on your face—till you
suddenly realize it's your kid. And what happens then, you run out, you grab
him by the ear, and you bring him back in. That's a little bit like us and Congress.
If they didn't care about us, they wouldn't be making these statements that
occasionally make us less comfortable or embarrassed or feel that it's unfair
criticism and so on. But the underlying point is ... how important [Congress]
thinks the agency is."

"I
think in the history of the agency, we were never a big player downtown,"
said one NSA official. "Until Bobby Ray Inman. Bobby Ray knew how to
manipulate and he knew how to punch the buttons and he knew how to ingratiate
himself, and he had a reputation, and it was well earned, as a straight
shooter. But the problem was nobody else in the agency knew how to do that. And
they saw what he was doing but they didn't understand how he was doing it or
why he was doing it. So they thought, If we ingratiate ourselves downtown, if
we train our people to respond to congressional inquiries, that this is okay.
We'll figure out how to do it. But they don't understand how to deal with
Congress. I think part of it is that the directors they brought up are political
clowns, klutzes, they don't understand how to deal with politicians. They think
that the aura of the agency will fake everybody out. And the problem is that
song isn't being bought anymore downtown. You can't go down and say, 'Trust us'
because it's no longer a question of secrets, it's a question of money."

Realizing
that NSA's very existence depended on reform, Hayden issued an edict: "Our
agency must undergo change if we are to remain viable in the future."
Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the attempt to move an iceberg like NSA
would inevitably produce fractures and fissures. "There has been much
discussion about this change," he told the residents of Crypto City,
"much agreement that it is necessary, but some reluctance to take the
actions to implement it."

Like
someone who had just inherited an old car, Hayden decided to call in the
repairmen to explain what was wrong and offer suggestions on how to fix it. He
put together two groups to take a close look at what makes NSA tick and
directed them to write up report cards. One group was made up of nineteen
middle-ranking insiders, the other of five outside experts on management.

The
insiders, known as the New Enterprise Team and led by the former deputy
director for technology and systems, Jack Devine, were brutal in their
criticism. Hayden jokingly referred to them as "responsible
anarchists." "Absent profound change at NSA," they told Hayden,
"the nation will lose a powerful weapon in its arsenal. . . . NSA is an
organization ripe for divestiture: its individual capabilities are of greater
value than is the organization as a whole. The legacy of exceptional service to
the nation that is NSA is in great peril. We have run out of time."

The team
also made no bones about the source of the troubles: current and past
leadership. Without naming names, they were clearly referring to then deputy
director Barbara McNamara and past director Kenneth Minihan as well as their
predecessors. "NSA has been in a leadership crisis for the better part of
a decade," Hayden was told. "It is the lack of leadership that is
responsible for both NSA's failure to create and implement a single corporate
strategy, and for the complete breakdown of the NSA governance process. . . .
These short comings have put us in dire straits. . . . Leadership has failed on
multiple fronts. It has not provided a corporate vision or strategy. It has
been unable or unwilling to make the hard decisions. It has been ineffective at
cultivating future leaders. And despite a decade of criticism from stakeholders
[Congress], it has failed to bring about real change. . . . Indeed, the
workforce has carried the NSA institution on its backs for the better part of a
decade."

The team
also described the climate within the thick walls and high fences in harsh terms,
referring to "our insular, sometimes arrogant culture."