Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (84 page)

The
"customer" can also define key world hot spots in which he or she has
a particular interest. Someone interested in the conflict in the Middle East,
for example, can receive all relevant finished Sigint every half-hour. A Sigint
search can be done to locate previously issued reports on the subject. Also, a
new feature will allow the viewer to see finished intelligence in video format
on the computer screen.

Of special
significance is the capability to instantly display CRITIC messages on screen.
Critical Intelligence reports are of the highest importance, and the CRITIC
system is designed to get them to the president in ten minutes or less from the
time of an event. When Saddam Hussein pushed into Kuwait in 1990, for example,
the first alert came in the form of a CRITIC. The issuance of a CRITIC is
instantly noted in the
National SIGINT File
by a flashing message in the
top left corner of the screen.

Among the
dozens of buildings in the invisible city is a strange yellow structure, across
the street from the headquarters complex, with a large round smoke pipe on its
roof. Deep inside, in a cavernous vat, a chunky man with a frowning mustache
jabs a shovel into a soggy pile of gray sludge. A few seconds later he plops it
over a drain several feet from his frayed green knee boots. America's most
closely held secrets—transcripts of North Korean diplomats' conversations,
plans for the next generation of eavesdropping satellites, algorithms for a
high-level crypto system—have been transformed into a pastelike pulp. For the
nation's secrets, it is the penultimate stop in their metamorphosis into pizza
boxes.

"Is
the National Security Agency literally burying itself in classified
material?" a curious senator once asked. He probably did not anticipate
the response of the NSA assistant director seated across from him: "It
would seem that way." According to a report by congressional auditors, the
NSA classifies somewhere between 50 million and 100 million documents a year.
"That means," the General Accounting Office report concluded,
"that its classification activity is probably greater than the combined
total activity of all components and agencies of the Government." With
more secrets than are held by the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, and
all other agencies of government combined, NSA likely holds the largest body of
secrets on earth.

Every
week, couriers from the Defense Courier Service lug nearly a million pounds of
materials stamped "Top Secret" and above to and from the city.
Formerly known as the Armed Forces Courier Service, the DCS is responsible for
transporting highly classified materials for all the services and the Pentagon.
Nevertheless, it is chiefly the NSA that packs its well-guarded trucks and
fills its thick canvas pouches. The NSA produces approximately 80 percent of
the 60 million pounds of material that the courier service handles annually.
Because of this, the NSA once attempted, unsuccessfully, to take over the
courier service.

While for
most at NSA, the problem is how to acquire secret information, for a few others
the problem is how to get rid of it. At one point the agency tried to have
secret documents exported to a pulp plant. The material, sealed in plastic
bags, was trucked to the Halltown Paperboard Company (apparently the only
company that would have anything to do with the scheme), several hundred miles
away in Halltown, West Virginia, where NSA would then take over the plant for
twenty-four hours. Dumped into a macerator, the NSA's secrets emerged as
low-quality cardboard. The problem with this system was that some paper was
just not acceptable, and the agency was left with 20,000 square feet of
warehouse space full of paper that had to be burned.

Finally,
in desperation, the agency turned to the American Thermogen Corporation of
Whitman, Massachusetts, for construction of what came to be known as White
Elephant No. 1. NSA officials journeyed up to the Bay State to view a pilot model
of a "classified waste destructor" and came away impressed. According
to the company, the three-story machine was supposed to swallow the agency's
mountains of secrets at the rate of six tons an hour and cremate them at
temperatures of up to 3,400 degrees Fahrenheit.

When this
marvel of modern pyrotechnics was finally completed, it had only one problem:
it didn't work. Instead of being converted into gases and liquids, which could
be piped off, the top secret trash would occasionally congeal into a rocklike
mass and accumulate in the belly of the Elephant, where jackhammers were needed
to break it up. On at least one occasion, horrified security personnel had to
scurry around gathering up bits and shreds of undigested intercepts, computer
printouts, and magnetic tapes that had managed to escape destruction.
Twenty-ton Army trucks had to be drafted into service, along with armed guards,
to cart the undigested secrets to secure storage at Army Intelligence
headquarters at Fort Holabird, just outside Baltimore.

In all,
the destructor managed to operate for a total of fifty-one days out of its
first seventeen months. By the time the agency canceled its contract with
American Thermogen, it had already paid off all but $70,000 of the $1.2 million
construction price. Said one red-faced NSA official, "Our research will
continue."

That
research prompted NSA to turn from fire to water in order to shrink its Mount
Everest of forbidden papers. "Try to imagine," said one NSA report,
"a stack of paper six feet wide, six to eight feet tall and twenty yards
long traveling along a conveyor belt towards you every ten minutes all day
long." By the mid-1990s, Crypto City was annually converting more than 22
million pounds of secret documents into cheap, soluble slurry. And in case the
paper flow increased, the new system was capable of destroying three times that
amount.

To
transport the huge heaps of "burn bags" crammed with discarded
secrets, NSA turned, appropriately enough, to Florida's Disney World. In
Fantasyland and the rest of the Magic Kingdom, accumulated trash is transported
automatically by underground conveyor belt to a central waste disposal
facility. Similarly, burn bags from NSA, the intelligence community's
Fantasyland, are sent down a Rube Goldberg—like chute-and-conveyer-belt
contraption known as the Automatic Material Collection System. The 6 ½ -foot-wide
conveyer belt then dumps the bags into a giant blenderlike vat that combines
water, steam, and chemicals to break the paper down into pulp. The pulped paper
is processed, dried, funneled through a fluffer, and finally, fifteen minutes
later, baled. Within a few weeks, the documents that once held the nation's
most precious secrets hold steaming pepperoni pizzas. In 1998, the agency took
in $58,953 in profit from the sale of its declassified pizza boxes.

Problems
arise, however, when thick magnetic tapes, computer diskettes, and a variety of
other non-water-soluble items are thrown into the burn bags. Once a week,
destruction officers assigned to Crypto City's Classified Materials Conversion
Plant have to use rakes, shovels, and hacksaws to break up the
"tail," the clumps of hard, tangled debris that clog up the
room-sized Disposall. Among the stray items that have found their way into the
plant are a washing machine motor, a woman's slip, and an assortment of
.22-caliber bullets. Because this residue, totaling more than fifty-two tons a
year, still may contain some identifiable scrap bearing an NSA secret, it is
left to drain for about five days and then put in boxes to be burned in a
special incinerator.

NSA was
able to turn an additional thirty tons of old newspapers, magazines, and
computer manuals into pizza boxes as a result of a spring cleaning program,
dubbed "The Paper Chase," in 1999. But paper is not the only thing
NSA recycles. It also converts metal from the tiny chips and circuit boards in
the agency's obsolete computers into reusable scrap. So many computers hit the
junk pile every year that the agency is able to recycle more than 438 tons of
metal annually from the small components.

Despite
the unfathomable amount of information destroyed by NSA every year, it is
almost negligible compared to the amount of data it actually saves, mostly in
the form of magnetic tapes. In Support Activities Building 3, a flat, nearly
windowless structure in Crypto City, NSA's Magnetic Media Division maintains
the agency's 95,000-square-foot tape library containing approximately 1.6
million data tapes. NSA is nearing the point—if it hasn't reached it
already—where it will be able to store the equivalent of more than half a
million typed, double-spaced pages (up to ten gigabytes) on a square inch of
tape. Thus its mammoth tape library may soon reach the point where all the
information on the planet can be placed inside, with room left over.

To cut
down on the expense of purchasing new tapes, NSA uses large
"degaussers" to erase used reels. Because of the enormous volume of
tapes, however, worries have developed over the degausser operators' exposure
to electromagnetic fields. More than a thousand current and former degausser
operators were surveyed in 1998 by the agency's Office of Occupational Health,
Environmental and Safety Services. Although the question of adverse health
effects is still unanswered, shielding was installed and the operators were
told to keep a distance from the powerful magnetic coils.

While
copies of secrets are regularly destroyed, the original information is seldom
given up. Down the street from the tape library, in Support Activities Building
2, is the NSA Archives and Records Center. Here, more than 129 million
documents, all more than a
quarter of a century old, are still hidden
from historians and collecting dust at enormous cost to taxpayers. Even NSA has
a hard time comprehending the volume of material. "The sheer number of
records is astounding," said one internal report. A stack of them would be
over nine miles tall, higher than the cruising altitude of a Boeing 747.

Also held
are tens of millions of recent documents, including 11 million "permanent
records" that trace the history of the secret city. In April 1996, NSA
finally declassified a January 1919 memorandum from U.S. Army Colonel A. W.
Bloor, a commander of the American Expeditionary Force in France. "The
German was a past master at the art of 'Listening In,' " the memorandum
said. "It was therefore necessary to code every message of
importance." However, many other documents from that same period, and even
earlier, are still classified.

As a
result of a tough executive order issued by President Clinton in 1995, NSA must
now declassify over 10 million pages of yellowing secrets. According to the
internal report quoted above, "The agency must review these records or
they will be considered automatically declassified on 17 April 2000." (The
deadline was later extended to 2001.)

To
accomplish this Herculean task, NSA established a project appropriately named
Plethora. As part of the project, a unique facility was built: the Automated
Declassification System. With advanced imaging technology, boxloads of ancient
documents—including delicate onionskin and smudgy carbon copies—are scanned
into the system from various workstations. Then, after consulting databases
containing declassification guidance, specialists magically erase
still-sensitive information from the now electronic documents. The sanitized
pages are then optically stored in a memory capable of holding up to 17 million
pages. But in the end, given NSA's numerous exclusions from the Freedom of
Information Act, the odds that the public will ever see even a small fraction
of those documents remain less than slim.

That NSA
has the technical capability to intercept and store enough information to
wallpaper much of the planet is unquestionable. What is in doubt, however, is
the agency's ability to make sense of most of it. "Sometimes I think we
just collect intelligence for the thrill of collecting it, to show how good we
are at it," said former CIA director Robert Gates. "We have the
capacity to collect mountains of data that we can never analyze. We just stack
it up. Our electronic collection systems appear to produce far more raw
intelligence data than our analysts can synthesize and our policymakers can
use."

The city's
brown, boxy OPS 3 building is the home of NSA's Information Systems Security
Organization and the agency's naval service, the Naval Security Group. It is
also where the agency's mammoth 66,000-square-foot printing plant pumps out
code and cipher materials for the U.S. government's sensitive communications.
Among the cryptographic items produced in the NSA Print Plant are the "go
codes," used to authorize nuclear war; small, square one-time pads—row
after row of scrambled numbers and letters—designed to be used only once and
then destroyed; and perforated cipher "key tape." Packaged in sealed
Scotch tape—like holders, the cipher strips are pulled out, torn off, and
inserted in cryptographic machines. The key tape is changed every day to ensure
security.

Across the
street is the ultramodern Special Processing Laboratory, NSA's state-of-the-art
microelectronics fabrication and printed-circuit-board factory. There, cloaked
head to toe in white clean-room apparel, agency scientists develop and produce
the chips and other components used in the country's most sensitive encryption
equipment. Among those special chips is the CYPRIS microprocessor, designed to
operate at 40 megahertz and able to obtain nearly 35 MIPS (million instructions
per second). At one time NSA accounted for 50 percent of the world's integrated
circuit market. Other scientists regularly attempt to redefine the limits of an
array of key technologies—from electron-beam maskmaking to "direct
write" wafer lithography.