Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (77 page)

Other
criticisms included focusing on building bigger and better bugs while paying
little attention to the needs of NSA's customers—the White House, Pentagon,
CIA, and other users of Sigint. "[You] care more about technology than
about the customer," one critic told the team. Another problem was
duplication.

The
outside team was no less sparing in its candor. Among the criticisms was NSA's
"slowness" in moving from old, comfortable targets, such as microwave
interception, to newer, more difficult targets, such as the Internet.
"Whatever the attractiveness of known targets and technologies,"
Hayden was told, "leadership must decide smartly when to move to more
difficult but potentially more lucrative targets."

Like its
in-house counterpart, the outside team also criticized the agency's
secrecy-driven culture. "Much of this can be attributed to the historic
insularity of the Agency," they said, "which grew up in a culture of
'NSA doesn't exist and doesn't talk to people who don't work at NSA.' " At
another point, the team noted "the 'Super Secret NSA' image ... is no
longer useful to Agency needs."

Again,
much of the blame was directed at the current and former senior management,
which cultivated not only a culture of excessive secrecy but also one of fear.
"We are concerned the present mindset fostered a society where people were
afraid to express their own thoughts," the outside team told Hayden.
"Even though people spoke to us with true candor, they always wanted to
avoid attribution because of the perception that the information was going to
be used against them." Nevertheless, the employees made it clear that NSA
was heading for the rocks. "The staff knows NSA is falling behind and is
not properly addressing the inherent problems of the emerging global
network," said the team, "and the present management infrastructure
does not appear to be supporting the required changes."

"In a
broad sense," Hayden said, both panels painted a picture of "an
agency that did not communicate with itself, or with others, well. Which—my
view now, not theirs—is the by-product of a great deal of compartmentalization
and insularity built up over almost half a century. A management culture that
found it difficult to make the tough decisions, largely because the decisions
were so tough." Also, he said, "They found that accountability was
too diffuse throughout the agency. I've used the phrase, 'You damn near have to
rent Camden Yards to get everybody that thinks he has a piece of the action in
on a meeting.' Smaller team, which gives us a little more agility."

Hayden
immediately set about implementing many of the panels' recommendations. On
November 15, 1999, he instituted "100 Days of Change," an ambitious
plan to put many of the reforms into place in a little more than three months.
At the same time, he sought to consolidate his power in order to blunt any
opposition from the conservatives. "Even the best game plan," he
warned, quoting legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul (Bear)
Bryant, "ain't got no chance if the players don't execute it." So
Hayden threw out the unwieldy senior management groups that held much of the
power. The Senior Agency Leadership Team (SALT), the Critical Issues Group, and
the Corporate Management Review Group vanished overnight. The one management
group he kept, the Executive Leadership Team, he stripped to the bone, leaving
only the director, deputy director, deputy director for operations, and deputy
director for information security.

To help
correct the budget problems that caused so much grief for his predecessor,
Hayden hired a chief financial manager, a first for NSA. Going outside the
agency, he chose Beverly Wright, a Harvard MBA with a background in investment
banking. At the time of her selection she was chief financial officer at Legg
Mason Wood Walker, in Baltimore. Her job, according to Hayden, was to develop a
management strategy for the agency and to "ensure that our mission drives
our budget decisions" and not the other way around.

He also
ordered the personnel promotion process streamlined and even began taking the
first baby steps to opening the door to the outside world a crack. Hayden would
announce these fiats in agency-wide memorandums called DIRgrams.

Finally,
in June 2000 Barbara McNamara received her long-expected transfer to London,
which paved the way for Hayden to name his own choice for deputy. Ironically,
rather than pick a young lion to help set the course for the new century, he
picked a retired agency employee who had started work at NSA even before
McNamara. Tapped was William B. Black, Jr., an old hand with thirty-eight years
of experience with the agency. But the last ten were no doubt the reason for
his selection; they were spent in areas promising to be most important for NSA
in the years to come. These included chief of NSA Europe from 1990 to 1993;
chief of A Group, the Russian codebreakers, from 1994 to 1996; and then special
assistant to the director for information warfare from 1996 until his
retirement in 1997. He also served a tour as chief of the Special Collection
Service, the covert joint NSA/CIA organization that specializes in worldwide
bugging, black-bag jobs, and bribery in order to penetrate foreign
communications facilities. Finally, because Black had worked as a senior
executive with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major
defense contractor, following his NSA retirement, he also brought some insight
from the corporate world.

By 2001
Congress was so pleased with the way Hayden was steering his ship away from the
shoals that it was looking for ways to keep him in place for up to five
years—two years over the normal three-year term.

The rise
of NSA's star since the end of the Cold War has been at the direct cost of the
CIA and its dwindling ranks of clandestine officers. Human spies have proved no
match when measured against the trusted rapid-response eavesdroppers at NSA. No
love is lost between the two agencies; former NSA director William Odom, a
retired Army lieutenant general, offered a caustic view of his agency's rival
across the Potomac. "The CIA is good at stealing a memo off a prime
minister's desk," he said, "but they're not much good at anything
else."

A former
CIA director, Robert Gates, said that the Gulf War might have proved a Waterloo
of sorts for the clandestine service: "Perhaps the most compelling recent
example of the gap between our technical and human capabilities was the Persian
Gulf War. U.S. military commanders had superb imagery and signals intelligence,
but we had only sketchy human intelligence on Iraq's intentions prior to
invading Kuwait, Iraq's ability to withstand sanctions, and the status of
Iraq's weapons program."

By 1998,
the CIA had no more than ten or fifteen clandestine espionage operations active
at any one time around the world, and the Directorate of Operations (DO), home
of the spies, had shrunk to well below 1,000 officers.

Reuel Marc
Gerecht, an officer in CIA's clandestine service from 1985 to 1994, called into
serious question not only the quality but even the veracity of much of the
reporting by DO officers in sensitive parts of the world. Writing in the
February 1998
Atlantic Monthly,
under the pseudonym Edward G. Shirley,
Gerecht called the DO "a sorry blend of Monty Python and Big
Brother." "The sad truth about the CIA," he said, "is that
the DO has for years been running an espionage charade in most countries,
deceiving itself and others about the value of its recruited agents and
intelligence production." By the mid-1980s, he noted, "the vast
majority of the CIA's foreign agents were mediocre assets at best, put on the
payroll because case officers needed high recruitment numbers to get promoted.
Long before the Soviet Union collapsed, recruitment and intelligence fraud—the
natural product of an insular spy world—had stripped the DO of its integrity
and its competence."

Gerecht
complained that even in critical field positions, the agency paid little
attention to matching skills to countries. "Not a single Iran-desk chief
during the eight years that I worked on Iran could speak or read Persian,"
he said. "Not a single Near East Division chief knew Arabic, Persian, or
Turkish, and only one could get along even in French." Another former
agency officer pointed out that the CIA teams dispatched to northern Iraq to
assist the political opposition in the mid-1990s "had few competent
Arabic-speaking officers."

"The
CIA's spy service has become an anachronism," argues Melvin A. Goodman, a
twenty-four-year veteran Soviet analyst of both the CIA and the State
Department. Now a professor at the National War College, he gave a number of
examples to show why the cloak-and-dagger spies have become an endangered
species. "CIA sources failed to decipher Leonid Brezhnev's intentions
toward Czechoslovakia in 1968, Anwar Sadat's toward Israel in 1973, and Saddam
Hussein's toward Kuwait in 1990. . . . It's time," he concluded, "to
jettison the myth that only clandestine collection of information can ascertain
the intentions of foreign leaders."

So far had
the CIA's human capabilities dwindled by 1998 that it led House Intelligence
Committee chairman Porter Goss—himself a former CIA case officer—to declare,
"It is fair to say that the cupboard is nearly bare in the area of human
intelligence."

Over the
1990s, the CIA's staff was slashed by 23 percent and the agency's slice of the
intelligence budget pie became a narrow wedge. When handing out about $27
billion to the intelligence community as part of the 1999 federal budget,
Congress gave NSA a "huge increase," said one staffer, while leaving
CIA's funding about level. A few weeks later Congress awarded an additional
$1.5 billion in emergency supplemental funds. The technical spies received what
one observer called "a windfall"—nearly $1 billion—while less than 20
percent went to the CIA's human agents.

Robert
Gates thought his agency should completely scrap its covert, paramilitary
capability and make its analytic staff "much smaller." Noting the
irony, the longtime head of the agency's Directorate of Intelligence pointed
out in 1996, "I say that after having spent a good part of the eighties
building it up!"

Not only
had CIA's status as an intelligence collection and covert action agency hit
rock bottom by the end of the century, so had the director's role as chief of
the entire intelligence community. Although in theory the CIA director is
responsible for all U.S. spy agencies, Gates said that in practical terms this
is no longer so. "We don't really have a Director of Central Intelligence
[DCI]," he said in a CIA publication. "There is no such thing. The
DCI at CIA controls only a very small portion of the assets of the Intelligence
Community, and there are so many entities you don't have any director."

Nor does
the DCI have any real power over the community's purse strings. A commission on
intelligence reform headed by former defense secretary Harold Brown and former
senator Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire noted in 1996 that the director of
central intelligence controls only 15 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget.
Two years later even that estimate had dropped. Speaking about the authority of
the DCI, John Millis in late 1998 said, "It is very difficult to exercise
authority over the National Foreign Intelligence Program and all its agencies
because ninety percent of them are funded and owned and operated by the
Department of Defense." That, in Millis's view, has led to another
problem: "an absolute and total fixation on near-term, tactical
intelligence" at the cost of strategic—political and
diplomatic—intelligence. "Since Desert Shield/Desert Storm," he said,
"we have abandoned the strategic mission in large part to meet the
pressing requirements the military has made for tactical intelligence."

In an
effort to rebuild the Clandestine Service, the CIA, in the late 1990s, began
the largest recruitment drive for new case officers in its history. From 1998
to 1999 the number of job offers jumped 52 percent. Director George Tenet also
directed the rebuilding of the CIA's overseas presence and the overhauling of
the agency's clandestine training facility—"the Farm"—at Camp Perry
near Williamsburg, Virginia. The number of clandestine and covert action
specialists trained annually had dropped to less than a few dozen. But by 1999
the number of students, most of whom were between the ages of twenty-seven and
thirty-two, had jumped to 120 and was expected to rise to 180 over the next few
years. At an average cost of $450,000 to train a case officer, rebuilding the
Clandestine Service is a significant investment. To further beef up the human
spy capability, Tenet has allowed the Defense Humint Service, the Pentagon's
human intelligence agency, to send its students to Camp Perry for training.

Tenet made
rebuilding the CIA into a significant intelligence agency his top priority. In
a speech at Georgetown University in the fall of 1999, he clearly signaled that
he preferred human spies over machines. "At the end of the day," he
said, "the men and women of U.S. intelligence—not satellites or sensors or
high-speed computers—are our most precious asset."

In fact,
the combination of human and machine spies may, in the end, save both.
According to senior intelligence officials, in 1978 a covert joint intelligence
organization was formed, which marries the clandestine skills of the CIA with
the technical capabilities of the NSA. The purpose of this Special Collection
Service (SCS) is to put sophisticated eavesdropping equipment—from bugs to
parabolic antennas—in difficult-to-reach places and to target key foreign
communications personnel for recruitment.