Standing at his eavesdropping-proof windows, Director Hayden could survey his burgeoning empire—a top-secret town of more than sixty office buildings, warehouses, factories, laboratories, and living quarters—stretching far into the distance. At the heart of the invisible city was NSA’s massive Headquarters/Operations Building, a complex so large that the U.S. Capitol Building could easily fit inside it—four times over. A modern, boxy structure with floor after floor of dark, one-way glass, the complex looked from the outside like it could be a large insurance company or a stylish office building.
Born on March 17, 1945, Hayden grew up amid the steel mills and towering smokestacks of Pittsburgh’s North Side, daydreaming about a career as a professional football player with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Harry Hayden, Sr., his father, worked the 3:30-to-midnight shift as a welder at the Allis-Chalmers plant, which built mammoth electrical transformers.
In college and graduate school at Duquesne University, he avoided hard math and science courses and instead studied history while earning money behind the wheel of a taxi and as a night bellman at the Duquesne Club. During the height of the anti–Vietnam War era of the late 1960s, when students were burning their draft cards, Hayden went in the opposite direction, excelling in ROTC and becoming a distinguished graduate of the program. He entered the Air Force in 1969, shortly after finishing graduate school, and spent most of his career in staff intelligence assignments, including a stint as an air attaché in Sophia, Bulgaria. Hayden was in Korea serving as deputy chief of staff for the United Nations Command when he secretly received word of his new assignment to NSA.
Arriving at NSA in April 1999, he found an agency holding on to its technology tail for all its life. The same organization that once blazed the path in computer science, going where the private sector feared or could not afford to go, was now buying off-the-shelf technology. “Most of what they [NSA] were expert in is no longer relevant,” said a former director. “Getting them to embrace the new world has been traumatic. . . . All they’re trying to do is hang on and survive.”
The congressional intelligence committees also saw NSA’s ship heading for the shoals and, like worried first mates, began sounding the alarm, pressuring NSA to quickly begin turning away from the rocky coast. For years, they believed, NSA’s leadership had simply ignored the agency’s many problems. “Congressional leaders told me at our first meeting,” said Hayden, “that the agency had fallen behind and was in danger of irrelevance. The challenge was above all technological. As one congressional leader put it, ‘You need to hit a home run your first time at bat.’”
In a candid talk, Hayden told his staff that what was at stake was nothing less than the very survival of NSA. “As an agency,” he said, “we now face our greatest technological and analytic challenges—diverse and dynamic targets; nontraditional enemies and allies; a global information technology explosion; digital encryption; and others. Make no mistake, we are in a worldwide competition for our future.”
One of the major problems confronting NSA was a growing switch in technologies throughout the world. Some of NSA’s targets continued to use traditional methods of communications—unencrypted faxes and phone calls transmitted over microwaves and satellites—which NSA was still very capable of intercepting. But other targets had switched to far more complex communications systems—circuit encryption, fiber-optics, digital cellular phones, and the Internet. The problem was spending vast amounts of money, time, and expertise to develop ways to penetrate the new systems while not overlooking the old systems.
For NSA, day had become night in attempting to switch gears from fighting the Cold War to fighting terrorism—especially terrorists operating independently of foreign governments. “Our world kind of turned upside down,” said one senior NSA official. “The target changed overnight on 9 November 1989, and we began to search for what our next target would be. That happened to everyone in the intelligence community. But at NSA it was far more revolutionary. Cyberspace has no geographic boundaries. The computer that decides what is happening in one place may be geographically in another part of the world. Traffic lights in a place like Nashville, Tennessee, are controlled by a computer in Chicago.”
In the old days, said the official, you could tell what kinds of communications were being transmitted simply by the sound—the sounds of Sigint (signals intelligence). “You could tell a fax from a teleprinter just by the sound. The ear could tell you the mode of transmission. But now in the digital world, every single one of those sounds of Sigint became one sound—what we call a beat and a rush. There was no other identification. That began the change from the analog world to the digital world. Everything we had learned in the analog world in the way to approach a problem didn’t work in the digital world.”
Another advantage of the Cold War was that the Soviet Union, with its fixed military bases, naval ports, and airfields, was largely stationary and the military components were always chatting back and forth. Much of the communication among these units was transmitted over low-cost unencrypted high-frequency channels. Thus, by ringing the Soviet Union with massive high-frequency listening posts targeted at the various key communications nodes, they would be able to eavesdrop constantly.
Also, a large percentage of the world’s communications were transmitted and received via satellite during the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, NSA needed to do little more than plant a giant dish-shaped antenna in an open field and collect the millions of phone calls, faxes, and other forms of communications falling into it like rain. Through a highly secret pact known as the UKUSA agreement, NSA and its close partners in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand collected and then shared this worldwide satellite intelligence—a system known as Echelon.
Yet more and more communications companies had begun to switch their networks from satellites, with their half-second time delay and occasional atmospheric interference, to buried fiber-optic cables. Made up of bundles of tiny, hair-thin glass strands, fiber-optics offers greater volume, more security, and higher reliability. Where satellite communications are as easy to collect as sunshine, fiber-optic signals require the skills of a mole. As telephone calls began going from deep space to deep underground, it began to spell eventual doom for Echelon.
“The powers that be are trying to kill it so fast because it’s a legacy [outmoded system],” said one NSA official at the end of August 2001. “We probably won’t even use it in two or three years. It’s an outdated mode of Sigint. Just one percent of the world’s communications travel by satellite now—and much of that is U.S. communications. The amount of intelligence gained from Echelon is still relatively high, because we’ve been so slow in going to those other modes of communications. There’s talk about a 300-percent growth in fiber-optic communications, and the [digital] packet switching is now up through the roof.” Instead of telecommunications, many of the satellite companies were switching to serving the burgeoning growth in cable television channels.
Another NSA official agrees that Echelon has become largely obsolete but says it still provides useful, but limited, intelligence. “There are still things that you can pick up,” the official said. “You can get some limited cell phone stuff where you have access to people using cell phones on the ground. You can get a little bit of cell phone stuff from space, but not as good as we’d like it. It’s getting better, but it’s hard. The bad guys are pretty disciplined about how they use it.”
Even though the agency had developed a way to tap into fiber-optics, getting access to the cables buried in foreign countries was still a major problem. In 1990, the agency was so worried about the issue that it fought against export of the technology to Russia. The United States denied, for example, an export license to US West Inc. for a proposed trans-Siberian cable project. By 2000, NSA was facing a second, far more sophisticated generation of fiber-optic technology.
Also up was voice traffic, which had been increasing in volume at 20 percent a year. This was largely as a result of new digital cellular communications that were far more difficult for NSA to analyze than the old analog signals. Rather than consisting of voices, the digital signals were made up of data packets that may be broken up and sent a myriad of different ways. “Today you have no idea where that information is being routed,” said one intelligence official. “You may have somebody talking on a telephone over a landline and the other person talking to them on a cell phone over a satellite. You don’t know how it’s being routed, it’s going through all kinds of switches, the information is not where you think it is, and that’s what has created the complexity and that’s what we have to figure out how to deal with.”
In the same way that NSA was facing enormous new difficulties switching from the Cold War to terrorism in its eavesdropping operations, it was having similar problems in code breaking.
“There was nothing more important than the Soviet cryptanalysis problem, and so we had literally thousands of people working on the problem,” said one former senior NSA cryptanalyst whose career stretched into the late 1990s. “The successes were few and far between, and so the life of the cryptanalyst was not a lot of fun. You were working on data that was probably older than Korea sometimes. Many times if you made progress against it, it wasn’t because you took on the mathematics. It was because of a bust [a mistake on the part of the foreign cryptographer or an electrical or mechanical anomaly]. So cryptanalysts didn’t really develop very well in that environment because of their modest expectations and virtually no success.” Most of the progress, the former official said, came from successful attacks on less difficult Third World countries that were friendly to the Soviet Union.
During the Cold War, the cryptanalysts—code breakers—and signals analysts were divided up among the three major area groups: the Soviet Union and its satellite countries (A-5), China and Communist Asia (B-6), and the rest of the world (G-4). Then, in 1992, in response to the end of the Cold War, they were all consolidated in a single new group: Z. “There were two issues,” said the official, “who was the enemy and what methodology do you use to fight the new enemy?” The problem was that because so many cryptanalysts knew only the old techniques and methods for attacking Russian codes and ciphers, they were applying the same methods to the new targets, such as China, and the countries suspected of terrorism, such as Iran and Iraq. And they weren’t working. “The Soviet cryptanalysts wanted to take their methodology and apply it to the PRC,” the former official said. “It was an impossible job. And that methodology was useless against terrorists.”
In charge of all of NSA’s eavesdropping and code breaking was Maureen A. Baginski, the agency’s director of Sigint, one of the most powerful positions in the U.S. intelligence community. Thin, petite, with thick dark eyebrows, wavy brown hair, and a gift for speaking bureaucratese, she had a wood-paneled office that was the NSA director’s office during the first decade of the agency. It was where the agency directed its worldwide electronic spies during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—a time when Baginski was still in high school. But by September of 2001, Baginski had been with NSA for twenty-one years.
“The career path from college was studying to be a Russian linguist, spending a year in the USSR—1976–1977—at a foreign-language institute—Moriz Torez, named after a good French Communist,” she said. “My experience in the Soviet Union caused me to make a very deliberate decision to come and work in defense. I knew I wasn’t willing to carry a weapon like my dad did, so I decided to look for a different kind of weapon and made a decision to come to NSA.” After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Russian and Spanish and a master’s in Slavic languages from SUNY, Albany, she began her career at NSA teaching Russian and went on to become a signals operations officer, moving into NSA’s epicenter, the National Security Operations Center (NSOC), which keeps watch over the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping, code-breaking, and code-making operations. Eventually, she became the agency’s top Russian expert and the senior official in charge of NSOC before General Hayden put her on the fast track to become the country’s top international eavesdropper.
By 2001, Baginski was well aware that NSA had fallen dangerously behind and was now simply on a par with its enemies, including the terrorists.
“We were always out ahead in the technology arena,” she said. “Over the past decade, we have lost that edge to industry. What has happened as a result is our adversaries and us have available the exact same technology, and it allows your adversary to have any kind of telecommunications technology anywhere in any mode all the time. Wireless, encryption, all of that has moved out of what was a sphere really for large government organizations into being readily available to anyone. So what you have is an adversary who because of the technology can operate at a speed of business that makes his decision cycle awfully short. And what we have to do is be able to operate at the same or faster speed and match his speed of business. So that’s our challenge—it’s to be able to operate in our adversary’s information space, just the same way our adversary operates.”
A major problem facing NSA is the needle-in-the-haystack conundrum. “Are we going deaf or are we drowning? The answer’s yes,” Baginski frankly admitted. “And it’s not that we’re not hearing or sensing things. It’s that there’s too much of it and it’s too hard to understand, so the effect of the volume, velocity, and variety is deafening. There’s so much out there.”
With tens of millions of communications continuing to be vacuumed up by NSA every hour, by 2001 the system had become overwhelmed as a result of too few analysts. “U.S. intelligence operates what is probably the largest information-processing environment in the world,” said former NSA Director William O. Studeman. “Consider this: Just one intelligence collection system alone can generate a million inputs per half hour.” In other words, dozens of listening posts around the world each sweep in as many as two million phone calls, faxes, e-mail messages, and other types of electronic communications an hour. That enormous volume was one of the key issues that most worried former House Intelligence Committee Staff Director John Millis. “We don’t come near to processing, analyzing, and disseminating the intelligence we collect right now,” he warned. “We’re totally out of balance.”