Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (89 page)

At an
intercept station in Marietta, Washington, the gray operations building lies
abandoned and ghostlike. "While standing amongst the weeds, trash, and
wrecked automobiles," said a former technician who decided to return for a
visit, "my ears caught a faint sound coming from the remains of the ops
building." Then he realized what he was hearing: "Several hundred
rats rummaging through the piles of garbage."

The
powerful wave of Cold War fears that decades earlier had swept listening posts
onto remote mountaintops and Arctic wastelands and into hidden valleys was now
receding like a fast-falling tide.

During
deactivation ceremonies at Edzell, Scotland, near the elephant cage that had
captured so many Soviet voices, the only sound was the piercing skirl of a lone
bagpipe playing the haunting farewell "We're No' Awa' Tae Bide Awa'."

At Key
West, Florida, where reports had flashed to the White House during the Cuban
missile crisis, a bugler sounded "Taps" and an NSA official watched
the flag descend for the final time.

In the
Command Conference Room at Kamiseya, Japan, once the Navy's largest listening
post, the commanding officer solemnly read from a classified message ordering
the station's closure.

At Skaggs
Island, California; Karamürsel, Turkey; and dozens of other listening posts
around the world, massive antennas were disassembled as quietly as they had
been built.

Once a
forbidden and frozen land populated exclusively by eavesdroppers, the Alaskan
island of Adak was put up for sale on the Internet. Satellite dishes, power
plant, the Adak museum, schools, even the church were to go to the highest
bidder.

After
seventy-nine years of operation, the last watch was stood at the naval
listening post at Imperial Beach, California, near San Diego.

Many
listening posts not closed were virtually abandoned and turned into remotely
controlled operations. At the small monitoring station atop Eckstein, a high
German peak overlooking what was once Czechoslovakia, the intercept operators
were replaced with automatic antennas controlled in Augsburg, more than five
hours away by car. The only people left were a few security guards and several
maintenance staff.

The
drawdown was not limited to NSA. In the far north, on the doorstep of the North
Pole, several hundred people were cut from the Canadian listening post at
Alert, the most important in the country. As with Eckstein and many other
listening posts around the world, technology now permitted the station to be
operated remotely from thousands of miles away.

Across the
Atlantic, Britain's GCHQ was going through the same post—Cold War trauma. In
1995, 900 of 6,000 jobs were ordered cut from the headquarters in Cheltenham
over four years. Listening posts were also nailed shut, including the
monitoring station at Culmhead in Devon, cutting 250 jobs.

As at NSA,
a number of GCHQ's overseas stations switched to remote control. Perched high
on a cliff in Hong Kong, the joint British-Australian Chung Horn Kok listening
post had long been one of the most important in the Far East. But all except a
skeleton crew pulled out and moved thousands of miles away, to downtown
Melbourne. There, in a windowless two-story gray stone building, intercept
operators from Australia and New Zealand eavesdropped on Chinese and Russian communications
picked up by British antennas in Hong Kong. "Most of the [intercepted
information] went back to the NSA," said one of the staff. Among the key
targets were Chinese testing of nuclear and other advanced weapons, and of
space flight and military activities on the troublesome Paracel Islands in the
South China Sea. Melbourne also monitored Russian communications from
Vladivostok to the Russian base at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.

But that
all came to an end in the mid-1990s as Britain prepared for the return of Hong
Kong to China. GCHQ officials ordered all its Hong Kong buildings razed to
eliminate any chance that secrets would be compromised. By July 1997, when the
handover took place, the windowless operations buildings had been reduced to
rubble and the guard post was occupied by a vagrant sheltering from the rain.
GCHQ did leave some equipment behind, however. Planted in the walls of the
British army's former Prince of Wales barracks, which was turned over to the
Chinese, was an assortment of listening devices.

Some at
GCHQ feared that if staff numbers dropped below 4,500, the agency would begin
to seem minor in the eyes of NSA. "If we can stay at 4,500 we can be a
vibrant and effective organization," said Brian Moore, a GCHQ staff
officer. "If we don't stabilize at 4,500, there must be a question mark
over GCHQ's core business." But for the first time an outsider—and one
known for his budget cutting—was appointed director. David Omand, deputy
undersecretary of policy at the Ministry of Defence, had made his name by
championing a series of initiatives designed to cut costs and boost the
efficiency of the U.K.'s armed forces.

For many
cryptologists, watching their secret world vanish into thin air was a difficult
and painful experience. In the Texas hill country, just north of Austin, Robert
Payne sat on his porch beneath an umbrella of stars. In the cool night, as
fireflies danced, he puffed on a long cigar and took sips from a pale green
coffee cup. "Who remembers what we did, how we did it, and why?" he
once wrote.

We were
young sailors and marines, teenagers, sitting with headphones and typewriters
copying and encrypting and decrypting and sending and receiving. Always on the
alert, ever vigilant . . . Who understands the contributions we made in those
far-flung outposts where we listened and watched through the endless days and
nights of a very real Cold War? Who knows, for certain, what our work
accomplished? I wonder what difference we made in the overall scheme of things.

I sit here
in the soft summer darkness and try to remember the names of all the places,
and ships, and stations where we served. And I wonder if somewhere down the
long, cold corridors of history, there will be monuments or memorials to these
special ships and secret places that have served their country so well. . . .
Places with strange-sounding names, surrounded by fences, gates, armed Marines,
and signs that warned "Authorized Personnel Only." Secret places with
funny-looking antenna arrays called "giraffe" or "dinosaur
cages." Places with names people have never heard.

Another
former intercept operator lamented, "Technology has progressed, so
yesterday's way of doing business is no longer today's way. ... The circle
tightens and grows smaller; our bases in the Philippines are gone. Keflavik,
Iceland, is gone. San Vito, Italy, is gone. Galeta Island, Panama, is gone.
Pyong Taek, Korea, is gone. Adak, Alaska, is gone."

On the
pages of the prestigious
Naval Institute Press,
a retired Navy
cryptologist wrote that the Naval Security Group had outlived its usefulness
and that the precious money used to run it would be better spent elsewhere in
the Navy. The future looked so dim that Rear Admiral Isaiah Cole, the Security
Group's director, was forced to reassure worried cryptologic veterans that
their organization was not going to fold. "There will continue to be a
Naval Security Group," he bravely asserted. But he had to admit that
because of budget cuts "these are troubled times."

As the
Cold War passed, so did NSA's boom years. In the early 1980s, "people
[were] stacked almost three deep," said one congressional aide. In 1983,
NSA building projects (totaling $76 million, with another $212 million slated
for the following year) accounted for almost 20 percent of the Pentagon's
entire construction budget worldwide. The addition of two new operations towers
provided the agency's headquarters complex with more space than eleven New York
City World Trade Centers.

But by
1997, the intelligence community budget had shrunk to what it had been in 1980,
during the last years of the Carter administration and just before the Reagan
administration gave the spooks the key to Fort Knox. At the same time, many of
NSA's precious eavesdropping satellites were dying of old age and not being
replaced. In the few years between 1991 and 1994, the number of spy satellites
dropped by nearly half. "NSA's relative piece of the intelligence resource
pie will likely diminish," Admiral William O. Studeman had told his
workforce in a frank farewell memorandum on April 8, 1992. "Things will be
tight, and the demand will be to continue to do more with less."

Studeman's
concerns were well founded. Between 1990 and 1997 the agency was forced to cut
its staff by 17½  percent and was scheduled to increase the total to 24 percent
by 2001. A commission headed by former defense secretary Harold Brown said that
at least 10 percent more staff should be cut throughout the intelligence
community. On top of that, a Pentagon inspector general's review in 1991—the
first one ever done at NSA—found that the agency was too top-heavy and that
management was asleep at the wheel in the oversight of a number of key areas.
"We found that the growth of the Agency had not been centrally managed or
planned," the inspection report concluded, "and that the NSA did not
have sufficient internal oversight mechanisms to ensure the Agency efficiently
accomplished its mission." The result was a serious bureaucratic shake-up.
On October 1, 1992, Mike McConnell, Studeman's successor, instituted a major
restructuring, slashing by 40 percent the number of deputy directors and by 29
percent the number of middle managers. Lower management was reduced by an
average of 50 percent. At the same time, the number of people reporting
directly to the director was cut from ninety to fifteen.
[4]

"NSA
personnel will be deeply affected by these changes," declared the
NSA
Newsletter.
McConnell told a group of his senior staff, "As resources
diminish we must reduce the Agency's overhead and build a structure that will
make us more efficient." But, the cutbacks in personnel seemed to have a
contradictory effect on the agency's budget. The cost of the shrunken workforce
grew because of inflation, promotions, and the higher cost of benefits. These
factors drove NSA's civilian payroll from about 30 percent of its budget in
1990 to nearly 40 percent in 1996. A White House study called the problem
"acute" and said these "growing amounts allocated to meet the
payroll have crowded out investments in new technologies and limited
operational flexibility." It seemed that the more people NSA cut the less
money it had for satellites and computers.

When
McConnell replaced Studeman in May 1992, the downsizing problem was on his desk
waiting for him. "Employees should take this opportunity to return to
their areas of expertise," said the
Newsletter,
paraphrasing the
new director. "Cross-training, technical tracks, and mission involvement
are the buzzwords of the future." The long handle of the budget ax
extended even to some of the agency's most remote listening posts. In a further
effort to reduce costs, NSA civilians began gradually being replaced by
military personnel at some of the listening posts not shut down entirely. As
the cuts continued into the new century, employees were encouraged to attend a
workshop called "Coping with Change," and a noted speaker was brought
in to give a lecture in the Friedman Auditorium on "Thriving in Turbulent
Times."

Most
believed there were few more secure places to work than NSA, and that
downsizing would never happen. "While our neighbors and family members in
the private sector faced job uncertainty, we remained secure," moaned one
worried worker in 1992. "We are now in the unenviable position of being
uncertain about our futures. It is not an easy time to work here." Exit
interviews with resigning employees reflected the same concerns. Many of them
felt that a bond had been broken.

But others
believed that NSA had long been overstaffed. Dr. Howard Campaigne, a driving
force in the computerization of code-breaking in the 1950s and 1960s, believed
that the machines should have reduced staff costs. "I had visions . . .
these would be labor-saving devices," recalled the former research chief,
"and we wouldn't need a lot of people around. And it's been a continual
disappointment that we had so many people around. Of course, what we've done is
use these devices to do more [work] rather than to do what we were doing before
more economically. But I still feel we ought to be able to do it with fewer
people. More machines and fewer people." For those displaced, the former
assistant director had one suggestion: "Join the 'buggy whip'
manufacturers. Retire."

To help
ease the trauma of drastic personnel reductions, over 4,000 employees were
given buyouts in 1999. At the same time, NSA offered a parachute dubbed Soft
Landing to many of the employees headed for the door. The idea was to transfer
the employees to jobs within the crypto-industrial complex—jobs with defense
firms that had significant contracts with NSA. During the first year, the
employee would be paid under an NSA contract, and after that he or she might be
hired full-time by the contractor.

Many such
contracts called for the employee to remain right at NSA, although in a
different job and in a different office. For example, Barbara Prettyman retired
from her job as chief of staff for NSA's Health, Environmental, and Safety
Services. Hired by Allied Signal under the Soft Landing program, she simply
moved over to the agency's Information Systems Security offices, where she was
assigned to create a national colloquium for information security education.