Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (91 page)

"We
need to hire a lot more people than we have authorized strength to do,"
Terry Thompson told a group of employees in late 1999. "The DO has
recently told the Human Resources Review Group that they would like to hire
twenty-six hundred more people to do language work and IA work, Intelligence
Analyst work. And the reason for that is, if they look at their attrition
projections, they expect to lose about a thousand people over the next couple
of years and so they want to hire those people back. And then they want a
plus-up of about sixteen hundred people over and above that, just to be able to
do the work that comes in today." According to one senior NSA official,
the agency hired about 698 people in 2000. For 2001, Congress gave NSA an
additional $3 million to go toward hiring, plus $3.5 million more to use for
signing bonuses for particularly desirable candidates.

Just as
the fall of the Soviet Union created a need for exotic languages, the
proliferation of low-cost, complex encryption systems and fast computers has
forced NSA to search for more mathematicians whom they can convert to
codebreakers. In a series of lectures at NSA in the late 1950s, William F.
Friedman, the father of modern cryptology, argued that cryptology should be
considered a separate and distinct branch of mathematics. It is little wonder,
therefore, that NSA employs more math majors than any other place in the country,
and possibly the world.

Thus the
national decline in math test scores, the decreasing focus on math in the
classroom, and the paltry number of graduate students seeking doctorates in the
subject have become major concerns within NSA. "The philosophy here is
that unless the U.S. mathematics community is strong, healthy, vibrant,"
said James R. Schatz, chief of NSA's mathematics research division, "then
we're not going to have the kind of population to recruit from that we
need."

Some at
NSA trace the growing scarcity of mathematicians back to the early 1980s. It
was then, according to one agency official, that "the agency succumbed, as
did the rest of the American society, to the increasing gap between its
population of technical specialists and a generalist population." As the
last editor of the
NSA Technical Journal,
which ceased publication in
1980, the official witnessed the decline in mathematical and scientific
education firsthand. It was one of the reasons for the
Journal's
termination,
he said, noting that many of the contributions were becoming increasingly
"irrelevant to (and unintelligible to) all but a small audience." He
added that if Friedman was correct in including cryptology as a branch of
mathematics, "then large numbers of NSA's employees, even at the
professional level (and within the professions, even within senior positions),
are ill-equipped for their trade."

In an
effort to reverse the trend, NSA recently launched a new program to seed the
academic soil in order to keep the supply of mathematicians coming. It involved
providing $3 million a year, through research grants, to mathematicians and
also to summer programs for undergraduates. Yearlong sabbaticals at the agency
were even offered to promising number lovers. In a rare foray into the
unclassified world, then-director Minihan expressed his worry to a convention
of mathematicians in 1998. "The Cold War is characterized by battles not
fought, lives not lost," he said. "That era was fought with
mathematicians arid cryptologists."

"Over
a three-year period," said Schatz optimistically in 1998, "we're
going to be hiring over a hundred mathematicians with Ph.D.'s. There's nothing
like that in the world, really. A university might have one or two openings a
year, if that." But just as NSA seems to be getting its need for
mathematicians under control, it is facing an even more daunting task in
recruiting enough computer scientists. Among the problems, according to Michael
J. Jacobs, chief of NSA's codemakers, is 42 percent fewer graduates with
computer science degrees now than in 1986.

Among the
most sensitive issues facing NSA in the post—Cold War period has been the
hiring, as well as promotion, of minorities and women. For years NSA has had
serious problems keeping up with the rest of government—and the rest of the
intelligence community—in such employment statistics. "I have been here at
NSA for over twenty years," wrote one frustrated employee in the
mid-1990s, "and as a minority, have experienced racial discrimination like
I have never seen before. The minorities here at NSA are so very stigmatized by
the 'Do nothing, powerless' EEO [Equal Employment Office] and the IG [Inspector
General] organizations . . . there is no adequate or effective process for
minority complaints here at NSA. Many racial discrimination and fraud cases
have been reported/presented to NSA's EEO and IG, and nothing, absolutely
nothing, has been done."

Another
complained, "EEO is a joke. . . . Nothing is held confidentially or
anonymously. Retaliation is common and well known around the Agency. Most
African Americans have stopped complaining and warn younger, less experienced
African Americans against complaining in fear of retaliation and
retribution." And still another cautioned, "It is a well known fact
that if you stand up for your rights it can be a crippling experience, but
become a whistle blower, and your career will experience the Kiss of
Death!"

In a 1988
study of the intelligence community, done at the request of Congress, the
National Academy of Public Administration found women and minorities
underrepresented at NSA. Two years later, the Senior Advisory Group, a group of
senior black NSA employees, examined the barriers faced by African American
applicants and employees in hiring, promotion, and career development. They
gave the agency low marks, citing institutional and attitudinal barriers. And
in 1993 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concluded that little had
been done to correct problems identified five years earlier. Finally, in 1994,
both Congress and the Pentagon's inspector general hauled the director in for
questioning as to progress in hiring and promoting minorities and women.

A key
problem, the Department of Defense inspector general pointed out, was the
tendency of NSA recruiters to go after the "best and the brightest."
"The philosophy," said one senior personnel manager, "is that it
is better to hire an applicant with a 3.2 grade point average from Stanford
than one with a 4.0 from a school you've never heard of." Although the
former strategy keeps the agency well endowed intellectually, it does not help
the agency correct its racial and gender imbalance, it was argued.

NSA did
make some efforts to recruit minorities, but more often than not they were only
halfhearted. In an effort to recruit Hispanic students, the agency set up a
Southwestern Recruiting Office in Phoenix in 1989. However, instead of staffing
it with a Hispanic recruiter, the agency sent a sixty-year-old black male. The
result was a total of eleven people hired in three years—none of whom were
Hispanic. The office was closed in 1992.

For
Director McConnell, the problem lay in the numbers. Although in 1993 women made
up 43.4 percent of the federal workforce, at NSA they represented only 36
percent. And while 27.7 percent of federal government employees were members of
minority groups, NSA's minority representation stood at a dismal 11 percent. In
his agency's defense, McConnell pointed to the highly technical nature of its
work—mathematics, engineering, computer science, and language: "skill
areas," he said, "in which minorities have been traditionally underrepresented."

For
example, McConnell noted, "we have probably the highest concentration of
mathematicians in the country." But "of the 430 doctoral degrees in
mathematics awarded to U.S. citizens in 1992, only 11, or 2.5 percent, went to
minorities," he said. "Can you imagine the competition for that 2.5
percent between companies like IBM or GM or whatever and NSA? It's very, very
stiff competition."

To help
correct the imbalance, McConnell established a policy of encouraging his
recruiters to make one-third of their new hires minorities. In fact, the
recruiters exceeded the quota, achieving 38.3 percent minority hires. But with
NSA hiring fewer than 200 full-time staffers a year between 1992 and 1996, the
quota system at this late date amounted to little more than tokenism. In the
meantime, McConnell was left to deal with complaints from the agency's white
males, who make up 57.5 percent of the workforce. Although no "reverse
discrimination" lawsuits had yet been filed, McConnell was holding his
breath. "So far I haven't gone to court," he said. "Time will
tell."

In an
effort to ease tensions, an Office of Diversity Programs was established to
help ensure that minorities were fairly represented in programs throughout the
agency. Among the units of the office is the Alaska/Native American Employment
Program, which in 1999 sponsored a presentation by storyteller Penny Gamble
Williams, the tribal chief of the Chappaquiddick Indian Nation of the Wampanoag
Indian Nation, relating tales passed down through the generations. A luncheon
of buffalo meat in the Canine Suite followed.

After more
than four years in the director's chair, McConnell retired on February 22,
1996. His replacement was Kenneth A. Minihan, a tall, broad-shouldered Air
Force lieutenant general. Unlike McConnell, who had spent most of his career in
staff (as opposed to command) positions, General Minihan arrived at NSA after
running two previous intelligence organizations: the Air Intelligence Agency
and, briefly, the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was born in 1943, the same
year as McConnell, in Pampa, a dusty, oil-soaked town straddling the old Santa Fe
Railroad in the Texas Panhandle. After graduating from Florida State University
in 1966, he entered the Air Force as an intelligence officer, serving in
Vietnam, Panama, and Italy and in a variety of positions in the Pentagon and at
Air Force Headquarters.

In 1981
Minihan went to NSA as chief of the Office of Support to Military Operations
and Plans. He also served in the agency's Directorate of Operations, as
commander of the Air Force's 6917 Electronic Security Group. Minihan was named
director of DIA in July 1995; there, one of his chief assignments was to review
tainted information about Russian weapons systems passed by the CIA to the
Pentagon. The Pentagon had received this bad intelligence because of the
massive compromise of American spies in Russia by CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames.

According
to Minihan, NSA's problems had become a great concern to both Secretary of
Defense William J. Perry and CIA director John Deutsch. "They would use
the phrase 'NSA doesn't get it,' " he said. "And they were somewhat
impressed with how I was beginning to take over the reins of DIA, in the sense
that we 'got it' at DIA." Thus the decision was made to shift Minihan to
NSA. During the transition to his new job, Minihan spoke to a great many people
both inside and outside government about the agency and was stunned to find
that the reaction was virtually universal. "I would say I spent a good
month or so talking with lots of people," he said. "It was almost
riveting in the common sense that they all expressed that we [NSA] don't get
it."

Once in
place at Fort Meade, it didn't take long for Minihan to understand why this was
so. "It . . . really surprised me, both how accurate Dr. Perry and Dr.
Deutsch were . . . ," he said. "In my mind we had fallen into a—I've
never used this phrase before—sort of like a loser's mentality, a loser's
mind-set." One cause, said Minihan, was the constant downsizing:
"We'd lost about a third of our workforce. What we had done is we were
accepting the loss of program and people resources as a norm. You've got
another three percent cut. So we're going through our tenth straight year of
three percent decline. And we just accepted that." Another early concern
for Minihan was finding a new deputy. When he arrived, the position was
occupied by William P. Crowell, appointed by Admiral McConnell two years
earlier. A native of Louisiana with an impish grin and a taste for Cajun
shrimp, Crowell joined the agency in 1962 and rose quickly, a decade later
becoming chief of A Group, the section responsible for attacking Soviet cipher
systems. Crowell foresaw the enormous impact that the personal computer would
have on both society and NSA and pushed the agency to begin taking advantage of
commercial, off-the-shelf technology. This was the key, he believed, to
improving both the way NSA attacked code problems and the way it disseminated
the results. Eventually rising to deputy director for operations, Crowell
championed the Intelink, the highly secret intelligence community version of
the Internet. "He was a 'geek' in the most positive sense," said former
NSA official Fredrick Thomas Martin. "He understood technology. He knew
the intelligence business."

But
Minihan was concerned that the position of deputy director had become too
powerful, so that the director was little more than a ceremonial chief.
"The DDIR [deputy director] is part of the seducing," he said,
"the seduction of the director, so that the director becomes the host for
dinners and lunches, the speaker at major engagements and awards and things
like that. . . . And so part of the DDIR's efforts are, in my view, to numb the
director." Adding, "It is not healthy to numb the director,"
Minihan also charged that deputy directors became bureaucratic warlords.
"They purge those beneath them who are not on their team, and then they
elevate those who have been on their team," he said. "Some people go
into exile, some people retire."