Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (85 page)

Another
windowless building a few blocks away, the Systems Processing Center, houses a
series of bizarre anechoic chambers. Like something out of a nightmare, every
inch of these vast baby-blue rooms is covered with giant dagger-shaped cones of
various sizes—up to eight feet high. The chambers are used to test intercept
antennas designed and built in the City. Chamber A, the largest, measures 42
feet wide, 42 feet high, and 90 feet long. It was designed to test antenna
frequencies up to 26.5 gigahertz. A transmitting antenna is placed on a raised
platform at one end of the chamber and a receiving antenna is installed at the
opposite end. Each of the cones, which are composed of special foam impregnated
with chemicals, is sized to absorb different frequencies.

A little
further on is the Research and Engineering Building, a massive, handsome,
dark-gray mausoleum dedicated to advanced eavesdropping. It houses the agency's
Technology and Systems Organization, which is responsible for the design,
development, and deployment of signals intelligence systems at NSA headquarters
and worldwide.

Among the
projects worked on was one to greatly extend the life of batteries needed to
run eavesdropping equipment hidden in foreign countries. "The problem of
providing power for years or decades for electronics in harsh environments
remains an unsolved dilemma," said one NSA technical report. One possibility
was the microencapsulated betacell, or "beta battery," which is a
nuclear battery. Beta batteries operate by converting the electrons from beta
radiation into light and then converting the light into usable electric energy
with photovoltaic cells. Such batteries are now in use.

Most of
the Technology and Systems Organization's several thousand employees are
computer scientists and engineers. The deputy director for technology and
systems in 2000 was Robert E. Stevens. High on his list of priorities was
pushing signals intelligence technology well into the twenty-first century.
Known as the Unified Cryptologic Architecture, it is a blueprint for taking
NSA's technology up to the year 2010.

Within the
Research and Engineering Building is NSA's Microelectronics Research
Laboratory, which works on such projects as thinning technology to reduce the
thickness of circuitry on computer wafers to half a micron, so that the
circuits virtually vanish.

Across the
Baltimore-Washington Parkway is another tall glass office building belonging to
the Technology and Systems Organization. Known as NBP-1, for National Business
Park, it is the centerpiece of NSA's highly secret crypto-industrial complex.
Stretching out below NBP-1, hidden from the highway and surrounded by tall
trees, National Business Park is a large compound of buildings owned by NSA's
numerous high-tech contractors, such as Applied Signal Technology, which builds
much of NSA's sophisticated satellite eavesdropping equipment. The crypto-industrial
complex, like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War, is a cozy
fraternity of business executives with close, expensive contractual ties to
NSA. According to one study, signals intelligence is a $2 billion market. In
just one year (1998) and in Maryland alone, NSA awarded more than 13,000
contracts, worth more than $700 million.

A
quick-turning revolving door allows frequent movement of personnel between the
agency and industry. To help swing even more NSA contracts their way, Applied
Signal Technology in 1995 named John P. Devine, just retired as NSA's deputy
director for technology and systems, to its board of directors. Likewise, TRW
hired former NSA director William Studeman, a retired Navy admiral, as its
vice president and deputy general manager for intelligence programs. The
massive consulting firm Booz-Allen & Hamilton, which frequently bids for
NSA contracts, hired Studeman's successor as director, retired vice admiral J.
Michael McConnell. And McConnell's former deputy director, William P. Crowell,
left NSA to become vice president of Cylink, a major company involved in
encryption products. Crowell had been through the revolving door before, going
from a senior executive post at NSA to a vice presidency at Atlantic Aerospace Electronics
Corporation, an agency contractor, and then back to NSA as chief of staff.
Another deputy director of the agency, Charles R. Lord, left NSA in 1987 and
immediately became a vice president at E-Systems, one of NSA's biggest
contractors.

Headquarters
of the crypto-industrial complex is in a white two-story office building at 141
National Business Park, just down the street from NSA's Technology and Systems
Organization in NBP-1. Behind the double doors to Suite 112 is a little-known
organization called the Security Affairs Support Association (SASA), which
serves as the bridge between the intelligence and industrial communities.
SASA's president is Lieutenant General Kenneth A. Minihan, who retired as
director of NSA in 1999. Its executive vice president for many years was
retired Air Force Major General John E. Morrison, Jr., a former head of
operations at NSA and long one of the most respected people in the intelligence
community.

SASA holds
symposiums and lectures throughout the year, and every May its awards gala
attracts a
Who's Who
of the intelligence community and the blacker parts
of private industry. In April 1997 SASA held a two-day symposium at NSA to
discuss the agency's cryptologic strategy for the next century. SASA's 1999
Awards Dinner, which honored former NSA deputy director Ann Caracristi,
attracted senior executives from over eighty companies involved in technical
intelligence, and scores of officials from NSA, the National Sigint Committee,
and other intelligence agencies.

The new
century promises to be good to NSA's contractors. In its 2001 budget
authorization, the House Intelligence Committee recommended that NSA begin
reaching beyond its high fences. Listing the agency's many new problems—fiber
optic communications, the Internet, and so on—the committee practically ordered
NSA to begin bringing in more expertise from the outside. "During the
1980s budget increases," said the committee, "NSA decided to build up
its in-house government scientists and engineers and the agency now seems to
believe that in-house talent can address the rapidly evolving signals
environment better than outsiders can. . . . The culture demanded
compartmentation, valued hands-on technical work, and encouraged in-house
prototyping. It placed little value on program management, contracting
development work to industry, and the associated systems engineering
skills."

The House
committee believed it was time for a change. "Today, an entirely new orientation
is required," said the 2001 budget report. "The agency must rapidly
enhance its program management and systems engineering skills and heed the
dictates of these disciplines, including looking at options to contract out for
these skills." According to Michael Hayden, "The explosive growth of
the global network and new technologies make our partnership with industry more
vital to NSA's success than ever before."

Like many
large communities, NSA's secret city has its own university, the National Cryptologic
School. It is located a short distance to the north in the NSA compound called
FANX.

"The
magnitude of their education, of their mental capacity was just overwhelming to
me," former director Marshall Carter recalled of the people he found
himself surrounded with when he left the CIA to direct NSA. "I made a
survey . . . when I got there and it was just unbelievable, the number of
Ph.D.s that we had at the operating levels— and they weren't sitting around
glorying like people do."

To channel
all that mental power in the right direction, NSA established what must be the
most selective institution of higher learning in the country: the National
Cryptologic School. The NSC was the final metamorphosis of the Training School,
which started out on the second floor of a rambling wood-frame building known
as Temp "R" on Jefferson Drive between Third and Fourth Streets in
southwest Washington. There, in the early 1950s, the students would clamber up
the creaking stairway between Wings 3 and 4, past the guard post, and disperse
into the five wings of the school.

Opened on
November 1, 1965, the NCS is located in a two-story building containing more
than 100 classrooms. Over 900 courses are offered, from Basic Sigint Technology
to three years of intensive technical training in the Military Elint Signal
Analysis Program. Also offered is the advanced National Senior Cryptologic
Course (Course No. CY-600), a seven-week, full-time course for senior signals
intelligence managers.

At Crypto
City's new NSA Graduate Studies Center, students can even obtain a "master
of eavesdropping" degree—actually a master of science in strategic
intelligence, with a concentration in Sigint. The program, which consists of
two years of part-time study, includes ten prescribed intelligence core courses
and four Sigint-related electives, along with a thesis. The NSC also boasts
what is believed to be the largest computerized training facility in the
country. Tests in 154 languages are available on new state-of-the-art machines.

For the
most advanced students of cryptology there is the Senior Technical Development
Program, which exposes a select group of employees to advanced cryptanalysis
and other specialized fields. The program may take up to three years to
complete. The seventeen graduates of the class of 1998 held their commencement
ceremony in OPS 1's Friedman Auditorium, with Director Minihan calling them the
"best of the best."

Following
a brain-cracking exam on the latest Sigint applications for high-temperature
superconductivity, or a quiz on local dialects of Lingula, students can go down
the hall to the Roadhouse Café for a quick gourmet coffee and a focaccia
sandwich.

In 1993
the NCS awarded certificates to over 38,000 NSA students. It also paid colleges
and universities around NSA $5 million for additional courses taken by NSA
employees. Additional contracts were awarded in other parts of the country.
During the 1980s, for example, the University of Wisconsin at Madison was
awarded more than $92,000 to develop proficiency tests in modern Hindi.
University officials were warned to keep their eyes out for anything or anyone
that might "have the potential for adversely affecting the national
security"—i.e., spies.

The first
"dean" of the National Cryptologic School was Frank B. Rowlett,
Friedman's first employee in the newly formed Signal Intelligence Service in
1930. In 1958, after five years with the CIA, he replaced the retiring Friedman
as special assistant to the director, a position Rowlett held for seven years
under four directors. While there, he led the study group that prepared the way
for the National Cryptologic School's founding and stayed on as commandant to
give it some direction. He retired two months later, on December 30, 1965.

On March
2, 1966, Rowlett became the third NSA employee to win the intelligence
community's top award when President Johnson presented to him the National
Security Medal during a ceremony at the White House. If the surroundings looked
familiar to him, it was because he had been there a brief nine months earlier
to receive the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service,
the highest award given to a civilian in the federal government. "His
brilliant achievements," read the presidential citation, "ranging
from analyses of enemy codes to technological advances in cryptology, have
become milestones in the history of our Nation's security."

Rowlett,
the last of the original band of codebreakers who started the SIS with Friedman
in 1930, died on June 29, 1998. On January 27, 1999, Kenneth Minihan stood in
the late-morning sun near a large canopy in Crypto City. Behind him was the
boxy, chocolate-brown headquarters of NSA's Information Systems Security
Organization, the agency's codemakers. As a small group watched, shivering in
the chill, Minihan unveiled a large granite boulder that resembled a grounded
meteorite. On the flat face of the stone was a large brass plate with an
inscription. "This building," it said, "is dedicated to Frank B.
Rowlett— American Cryptologic Pioneer—Head of the team that broke the Japanese
'PURPLE' cipher device in 1940—Principal inventor of SIGABA, the most secure
cipher device used by any country in World War II."

It was
only the second building in the city to be named for an individual, the first
being the Supercomputer Facility named after Dr. Louis Tordella. The effort to
name buildings is part of a new trend to bring a sense of history to the
residents of Crypto City. A by-product of NSA's preoccupation with secrecy is a
lack of knowledge of the agency's past. What few histories exist are so highly
classified with multiple codewords that almost no one has access to them. The
author of an article in the Top Secret/Umbra
Cryptologic Quarterly
emphasized
the point. "Despite NSA's size and success," he wrote, "its
sense of its own history (an important part of any organizational and
professional culture) is astonishingly weak. . . . Where clues to the Agency's
past are not absent altogether, they are in some cases seriously
misleading." The author had a recommendation: "We need to name our
buildings for our heroes; we need their photographs and plaques commemorating
their efforts in the corridors or our buildings. . . . We simply must do a
better job indoctrinating our people with the history and traditions of the cryptologic
service."

But in
2001, the light of the outside world was pushed even further away as
construction continued on one more high fence stretching for miles around the
entire city. By then Crypto City had become an avatar of Jorge Luis Borges'
"Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is
both infinite and monstrous, where all the world's knowledge is stored, but
every word is maddeningly scrambled in an unbreakable code. In this
"labyrinth of letters," Borges wrote, "there are leagues of
senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences."