Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (93 page)

To unify
his "team," Minihan attempted to break down the thick walls
separating the Sigint and Infosec (information security) sides of NSA as well
as the cultural barriers that divided the military and civilian workers. Where
the National Sigint Operations Center had been the exclusive club of the
eavesdroppers and codebreakers, Minihan brought in the Infosec folks and
renamed it the National Security Operations Center. He also launched the NSA's
first worldwide virtual town meeting. "We now have people talking about
both sides of the mission in ways that we haven't seen for a long, long
time," said one senior official, "and that's pretty exciting."

While many
in NSA welcomed Minihan's aggressive, all-for-one-and-one-for-all management
style and his budgetary innovations, the politicians on Capitol Hill who held
the key to the agency's strongbox were fuming. In 1998 the House Intelligence
Committee even threatened to withhold funds unless the agency made "very
large changes" in its "culture and methods of operation." Of
particular concern was Minihan's lack of adequate "strategic and business
planning" as well as the agency's resistance to ordered budget cuts, and
the diversion "from their intended purpose" of funds previously
allocated to the agency.

Minihan's
accounting system was also a shambles. According to a classified Pentagon
inspector general's report released in 1998, auditors found that NSA had not
instituted required internal controls and ignored laws and regulations, such as
the Chief Financial Officers Act, necessary to produce accurate financial statements.
"The NSA FY 1997 financial statements were materially incomplete and
inaccurate," said the report. "The financial statements omitted real
property located at a field site, a portion of Accounts Payable and a portion
of operating expenses." This was not the first time the Inspector
General's Office had found NSA's books out of order: in August 1996 it found
similar inaccuracies.

The
mismanagement left Minihan and NSA open to harsh criticism by House committee
members. The agency officials "cannot track allocations for critical
functions," the panel said in its report on the fiscal 1999 Intelligence
Authorization Act. As a result, "Fences have been placed on portions of
the [NSA] budget with the prospect that a considerable amount of money could be
programmed for other intelligence community needs if NSA does not develop
strategic and business planning."

Even more
humiliatingly, about the same time that the House report was released, the
Pentagon cut Minihan's direct lines to the Secretary of Defense and the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In a plan approved in late April 1998,
Minihan and other senior NSA officials had to first report through an assistant
defense secretary several rungs down the ladder, one responsible for command,
control, communications, and intelligence, or "C3I" in intelligence
jargon.

Adding to
Minihan's woes was the discovery that NSA for years had been seriously
mismanaging its mega-million-dollar high-tech computer and information
technology systems. One organization in NSA would buy a top-of-the-line system
only to discover that it was incompatible with other systems in the agency;
millions of dollars' worth of new equipment would be bought that duplicated—or
was inferior to—equipment already owned by the agency.

To correct
the situation, the Secretary of Defense ordered NSA to install a sort of budget
czar overseeing all purchasing and use of information technology. In 1997
Minihan named Ronald Kemper to the new post of chief information officer for
NSA. Kemper also headed up the agency's new Enterprise Information Technology
Office.

From the
moment he walked into his spacious office on the top floor of OPS 2B as the
fourteenth DIRNSA, Minihan had his eye on the new millennium. He saw a future
where wars were fought not on muddy battlefields but in the invisible ether, in
cyperspace, and there the NSA was king. "Just as control of industrial
technology was key to military and economic power during the past two
centuries," he
told the citizens of the secret city, "control
of information technology will be vital in the decades ahead. ... In the
future, threats will arise and battles will be fought and won in the
information domain. This is, and has always been, the natural operating
environment of the National Security Agency. . . . Information will give us the
power to pick all the locks."

Searching
for a catchy phrase, Minihan came up with "Information dominance for
America." Said Minihan, "And then a couple of times the Brits and
others beat up on me; I figure I got to add 'and its allies.' "

Minihan's
metaphor for the future was not a technology superhighway but a technology
sword, a sword that could cut both ways. "Though new technologies provide
tremendous opportunities to share information and develop new
relationships," he warned, "those same technologies are the primary
weapons of the electronic road warriors of the future. 'Techno-terrorists,'
ranging from mischievous teens to sophisticated nation and state adversaries,
have agendas and potential destructive powers far more wide-ranging than we are
accustomed to. Their targets will be our information databases, emergency
services, power grids, communications systems, and transportation systems. . .
. We must continue this fight."

The
centerpiece of Minihan's Year 2000 battle plan for NSA was his "National
Cryptologic Strategy for the 21st Century," in which NSA would take the
lead in the conflicts of the future—both protecting the nation from cyber
attacks and taking the offense with information warfare. Minihan put this work
on the same level as protecting from nuclear attacks. "Information warfare
poses a strategic risk of military failure and catastrophic economic loss and
is one of the toughest threats this nation faces at the end of this
century," he said. "We must be able to determine if we are being
attacked, who is conducting the attack, and what to do if we are attacked. . .
. We will also continue targeting intelligence for information warfare at
levels of detail and timeliness comparable to those achieved for conventional
and nuclear warfare."

But by the
end of his tour, Minihan still had not corrected some of NSA's most grievous
problems, and the House Intelligence Committee showed him no mercy. It bluntly
declared, "The committee believes that NSA is in serious trouble."
Although it continued to pour large sums into the agency's worldwide
eavesdropping network, its satellites and code-breaking capabilities, the
committee said, "money and priority alone will not revive NSA, nor the
overall [signals intelligence] system." The problem, said the panel, is
not lack of money but lack of management. "The committee believes that NSA
management has not yet stepped up to the line."

In a
farewell note to his employees, Minihan talked of both the successes and
setbacks of his tour. "Looking back," he wrote, "we have
accomplished much together. As is our tradition, those successes remain known
only to a few. We have also experienced the continuation of the largest
draw-down in our history. At the same time, we have been confronted with a
tidal wave of new technologies and transnational threats which some believed
threatened our very existence." Privately, in his office, Minihan was more
candid. "It's the hardest job I've ever had," he said. "It sucks
the life out of you. You know, if you're awake, you're thinking about this
job."

In his
last days, Minihan feared that his successor would shift from the course he had
set for the agency. "I think it will be catastrophic if we allowed the
person to drift away from the scheme that we've set up," he said to
several employees in his office. Then he said it was up to them to keep the new
director on course. "And I think that's actually more a question of you
and I and the folks here than it is a question for this guy. So I've done my
part with this guy. But his background is actually completely different if you
look back at us. I've been in the business a lot. He has not. I was sent here
with a 'Do they get it or not?' Now his question is, 'Are you going to stay the
course or not.' "

One week
later, on March 15, 1999, Minihan walked between a double row of well-wishers,
past the shiny turnstiles of OPS 2A, and out into the chilly air of retirement.
No more government-paid cook, car, and chauffeur. No more government housing.
No more secrets with his morning coffee. Gone was his subscription to the Top
Secret/Umbra
National SIGINT File,
gone was his high-speed connection to
the supersecret Intelink. Now his daily intelligence summary would be found rolled
in a plastic wrapper on the driveway of his new Annapolis, Maryland, home. In
place of a briefing on the latest advances against a Chinese cipher system, he
now had the daily crossword puzzle to tease his brain.

The moving
vans, loaded with Minihan's well-traveled belongings, had barely pulled away
from the handsome redbrick house on Butler Avenue when painters and cleaners
arrived to spruce it up for his successor. For more than four decades this has
been the official residence of the director of NSA. Located in a restricted,
tree-shaded corner of Fort Meade, it is equipped with its own Secure
Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). Inside the Vault Type Room is a
STU-III crypto phone connected to NSA, about three miles away, and a heavy safe
in which to hold highly classified documents brought home for late-night
reading.

On a wall
near the kitchen is a plaque containing the names of all the NSA heads who have
lived there—every director except for the first, Lieutenant General Ralph
Canine. After Minihan's departure, a new brass plate was attached to the
plaque, one bearing the name of Michael V. Hayden, an Air Force lieutenant
general and the fifteenth director of NSA.

In
addition to a house, Hayden had inherited an ax. He would have to use it to
slice away at NSA's personnel levels more than other directors had done. In
order to reduce the personnel rolls, NSA for the first time began turning over
to outside contractors highly sensitive work previously reserved to NSA
employees. This project, called Ground-breaker, was unveiled in 2000 to the
dismay of many in the agency. Projections were that it would "impact more
than 3,000 employees." As many as 1,500 employees and 800 contractors
would lose their jobs under the project. However, those affected would be
guaranteed jobs with whichever contractor won the bidding for the contract.
Those who declined to work for the new contractor would be let go.

Hayden
called the project "unprecedented" because it involved turning over
to private industry the management and development of nearly all of the
agency's nonclassified information technology programs. The contracts were
worth $5 billion over ten years. The drastic measures were taken largely
because of years of poor in-house management. "Our information technology
infrastructure is a critical part of our mission and it needs some
repair," said Stephen E. Tate, chief of NSA's Strategic Directions Team.
"It is a burning platform and we've got to fix it."

But some
longtime employees think the agency is sacrificing senior analysts to buy more
expensive satellites to collect more information to be analyzed by fewer
experienced people. "They're buying all those new toys," said one
twenty-six-year veteran, "but they don't have the people to use them. It's
always happened that way, but more so in the past seven or eight years. The
people who provide the intelligence aren't there anymore. So things are
starting to slip through the cracks."

Among
those cracks was NSA's failure to warn of India's nuclear test in 1998, a
mistake that John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists called
"the intelligence failure of the decade." Pike added, "The
question of 'toys versus boys' in the NSA budget has been, and will remain,
controversial. It's my understanding that Minihan's view of this is, they've
got too many people and they need more toys. They're clearly trying to have
their cake and eat it, too."

In order
to cut as few linguists and analysts as possible, some of the heaviest
reductions were made in support functions at NSA—turning the agency into a
colder and less personal environment. "There is a significant amount of
concern from Congress and from our overseers," Terry Thompson told a group
of technical employees, "about how much money and resources we're devoting
to human resources activity at NSA." He joked: "We have thousands of
people doing resources management at NSA; half of them spend time generating
work for the other half. If we had a good business process and a good way of
handling our budget . . . we could free up a lot of those to do other
things."

Thus, just
as NSA's vast unclassified information technology operations were turned over
to outside contractors, so were many of the agency's human resources
activities. The contract went to Peoplesoft, a California corporation that
specializes in automating human resources functions. "The transition from
working with a human being down the hall to working with a computer on your
desktop to do most of your human resources business is a tough transition for
everybody," said Thompson.

For
employees stressed out by all the changes, the agency has its own mental health
clinic. Hidden away in the Parkway Corporate Center in Hanover, Maryland, to
provide "anonymity and confidentiality," the center has a staff of
thirteen fully cleared clinical psychologists and social workers. In addition
to courses in stress management and coping with organizational change, the NSA's
Employee Assistance Service provides a wide range of programs, on topics such
as assertiveness training, bereavement, dealing with difficult people, weight
control, eating disorders, and even social skills enhancement. A
"significant number" of EAS clients, says one report, are treated for
depression. The EAS also has branch offices at NSA's major listening posts in
England and Germany.