The Secret Sentry (22 page)

Thirty years later, a raging controversy continues to swirl around the Israeli attack on the
Liberty
. The Israeli government admitted that its forces had attacked the ship, but claimed that it had been an accident. Although
the U.S. government accepted the Israeli government’s finding and reparation payment, this explanation was rejected by most
of the
Liberty
’s surviving crew members, who wonder how the Israeli fighter pilots and torpedo boat captains who attacked the ship could
not have noticed the huge American flag flying from the ship’s masthead. Former NSA officials and
Liberty
crew members have, more recently, alleged that NSA is withholding from the public transcripts of intercepted Israeli communications
that allegedly show that the Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship. But current NSA officials deny this claim,
although they acknowledge that NSA continues to withhold from public release a number of documents relating to the attack,
for reasons as yet unknown.

In the days after the attack on the
Liberty
, the Israeli military captured the Golan Heights and threatened to extend its advance toward the Syrian capital of Damascus.
But the Russians were not about to let Syria be humiliated in the same way as its Egyptian ally. At eight forty-eight a.m.
on Saturday, June 10, the Washington-Moscow Hot Line teletype machine in the White House Situation Room printed out a message
from Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin for President Johnson, one of the most ominous ever transmitted via this communications
link. It read, in part, “A very crucial moment has now arrived which forces us, if military actions are not stopped in the
next few hours, to adopt an in de-pen dent decision. We are ready to do this. However, these actions may bring us into a clash,
which will lead to a grave catastrophe . . . We propose to warn Israel that, if this is not fulfilled, necessary actions will
be taken, including military.” In other words, if the Israeli military’s advance on Damascus was not stopped immediately,
the Soviets would intervene militarily. Kosygin’s threat set off alarm bells all over Washington. CIA director Richard Helms,
who was in the Cabinet Room at the White House when Kosygin’s message was delivered, recalled, “The atmosphere was tense.
The conversation was conducted in the lowest voices I have ever heard.” The entire U.S. intelligence community was immediately
placed on alert, with NSA’s director of operations, Oliver Kirby, declaring a SIGINT Readiness Bravo Crayon alert for all
Soviet communications targets.
⁴⁴

Shortly after Kosygin’s message, SIGINT revealed that a number of Soviet airborne divisions and their associated military
transport aircraft had been placed on alert inside the Soviet Union. SIGINT also confirmed that at least some of Russia’s
strategic nuclear forces had been placed on alert. A month later, in July, SIGINT detected the largest integrated exercise
of Soviet strategic nuclear forces ever witnessed by the U.S. intelligence community. Not only were all units of the Soviet
Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF) tested in a series of high-level command post and communications exercises, but the Russians
sor-tied an unusually high number of submarines from their home bases and even sent a portion of Russia’s small strategic
bomber force to conduct simulated nuclear strikes on American targets from their Arctic staging bases. To put it mildly, the
unannounced exercise caused a fair amount of apprehension in Washington.
⁴⁵

Fortunately for all concerned, the Israeli army stopped its advance into Syria, and the Israeli government accepted an immediate
U.N.-sponsored ceasefire. The war officially came to an end at six thirty p.m. on June 10, 1967, and everyone in the U.S.
intelligence community breathed a deep sigh of relief.

The USS
Pueblo

In February 1965, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet recommended to the chief of naval operations that the navy acquire
at least one dedicated spy ship of its own to perform the kinds of SIGINT collection missions that NSA’s Liberty-class spy
ships were doing. The navy was frustrated that NSA’s fleet of “Technical Research Ships” such as the USS
Liberty
were oriented exclusively toward national SIGINT targets, making them next to useless for gathering the kind of tactical intelligence
on Soviet naval activities that the navy wanted but that NSA tended to ignore. So in 1965, the navy approved the conversion
of not one but three naval vessels into intelligence collection ships, designated AGERs, which would collect intelligence
solely for navy commanders. NSA very reluctantly agreed to allow this, because of fears that the navy had far more ambitious
objectives than the ones it cited as grounds for carrying out its own sea-based SIGINT operations.
⁴⁶

The navy selected three mothballed World War II–era cargo ships (AKs). The first was the USS
Banner
, a light cargo ship (AKL-25), chosen in July 1965 because it was “the least unsuitable hull that could be made immediately
available.” Seven weeks and $1.5 million later, the conversion was complete. Eight SIGINT antennae were bolted to the ship’s
superstructure and masthead; below the main deck just forward of the pilothouse, a SIGINT operations center nicknamed the
Sod Hut (where a twenty-seven-man SIGINT detachment was to work) was added. It was small and extremely cramped, measur ing
only about thirty feet in length and eleven feet in width, and was configured with five SIGINT intercept positions and a separate
communications position, which was less than one quarter the number of intercept positions on NSA’s much larger Liberty-class
spy ships.
⁴⁷

As soon as the conversion was completed, the
Banner
sailed to her new home port in Yokosuka, Japan, without undertaking any sea trials; arriving in Japan on October 17, she commenced
her first operational patrol on October 30. Over the next two years, the
Banner
provided valuable SIGINT about Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean fleet activities and antisubmarine warfare techniques.
⁴⁸

In November 1965, the navy was authorized to modify two more ships into AGER intelligence collection vessels. These ships
were the USS
Pueblo
and the USS
Palm Beach
. On April 12, 1966, the
Pueblo
was reactivated and taken to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, where it was converted into an AGER between June 1966 and September
1967 at a cost of $4.5 million. The
Pueblo
departed Bremerton, Washington, in September, and, after a brief shakedown cruise off San Diego, sailed for Japan, arriving
at the port of Yoko-suka on December 1. She sailed from the port of Sasebo, Japan, on her maiden voyage on January 11, 1968,
on what was supposed to be a routine three-and-a-half-week intelligence collection mission off the east coast of North Korea.
⁴⁹
Twelve days later, on January 23, the
Pueblo
was attacked and seized by North Korean warships in international waters twenty-five miles off the North Korean port of Wonsan.
One crewman, Duane Hodges, was killed during the attack.
⁵⁰

Weeks before the
Pueblo
sailed, on December 23, 1967, NSA had sent out a message to the U.S. intelligence community warning about the possibility
that the spy ship might be attacked by an increasingly belligerent North Korea and suggesting that “ship protective measures”—
i.e., air cover and/or a naval escort— be seriously considered. But a congressional investigation after the ship’s seizure
found that the NSA message “never reached responsible authorities” and observed that “the incredible handling of the NSA warning
message on the
Pueblo
mission is hardly looked upon with pride by responsible authorities in the Pentagon.” On January 2, 1968, nine days before
the
Pueblo
sailed into history, the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence wrote a memo to CIA director Helms also warning that the North
Koreans “might choose to take some sort of action against these ships.”
⁵¹

Intercepts of North Korean naval radio traffic indicated that the North Koreans were well aware of the
Pueblo
’s presence off their coast at least twenty-four hours before the attack, suggesting to American intelligence analysts that
the attack was premeditated.
⁵²
NSG listening posts in Japan intercepted radio transmissions from the North Korean warships during the attack that showed
that the ship was in international waters when she was seized, although intercepted North Korean radar tracking transmissions
reportedly indicated that she had violated North Korean territorial waters.
⁵³

The damage to U.S. national security caused by the capture of the
Pueblo
was massive and, in most respects, irreparable. An NSA history notes, “It was everyone’s worst nightmare, surpassing in damage
anything that had ever happened to the cryptologic community.”
⁵⁴

The problem was that the U.S. government could not admit this because, at the time, the Johnson administration was still sticking
to the cover story that the
Pueblo
was an “oceanographic research ship” engaged in routine scientific research. NSA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community
initially believed that the ship’s crew had managed to destroy all of the classified documents and equipment on the ship before
it was boarded by the North Koreans. Then a few days later, NSA was stunned when it received word that North Korean state
tele -vision had just broadcast photographs of a large number of Top Secret Codeword documents that had been captured on the
Pueblo
, including the titles of the documents. A few months later, the North Koreans published a book in French that included photographs
and the full text of many of the same NSA documents (some of which the agency still holds to be classified), demonstrating
what the
Pueblo
’s true mission was.
⁵⁵

Then, to make matters even worse, on January 27, 1968, four days after the
Pueblo
was seized, NSA intercepted the radio transmissions of a Vladivostok-based Russian navy AN-12 military transport plane as
it landed at the military airfield serving the port of Wonsan. American intelligence analysts were forced to assume the worst
case—that Russian experts had flown in and been allowed to examine the
Pueblo
’s SIGINT spaces and captured documents. Shortly afterward, a U.S. Air Force listening post in northern Japan, which was monitoring
the Pyongyang-to-Moscow facsimile link, detected that many of the classified documents captured on the
Pueblo
were being sent to Moscow.
⁵⁶

In the months that followed, several important SIGINT sources that NSA had been successfully exploiting in the Soviet Union
and North Korea dried up without any warning. The loss of these sources made the disaster complete. A January 24 Top Secret
Codeword cable from the director of NSA admitted that the capture of the ship was “a major intelligence coup without parallel
in modern history.” According to the report, the damage to U.S. SIGINT collection operations was deemed to be “very severe.”
⁵⁷

The White House, the Pentagon, senior U.S. military officers, and even the CIA and NSA all concluded that the mission had
been not only dangerous but also unnecessary. When asked by an army interviewer years later whether the
Pueblo
mission had been worth the risk, the commander of U.S. military forces in Korea at the time, General Charles Bonesteel III,
said, “No . . . the degree of risk was totally unnecessary. Now, I wanted intelligence. I didn’t have any damned intelligence,
real intelligence that could provide early warnings against a surprise attack from the North. But we didn’t need it in superfluous
COMINT. This was the intelligence tail wagging the dog.”
⁵⁸

The Invasion of Czechoslovakia

SIGINT proved to be valuable and effective in covering the Soviet military buildup for the invasion of Czechoslovak i a that
began on August 20, 1968. The purpose of the Soviet invasion was to topple the Czech government headed by a progressive-minded
Communist Party official named Alexander Dubc?ek. Immediately upon being elected in April 1968, Dubc?ek earned the ire of
Moscow by firing all of the hard-line Communists from the Czech government, then instituting a series of pop ular political
and social reforms that caused even more consternation in Moscow.

Within days of Dubc?ek taking power, SIGINT detected the movement of eight Soviet combat divisions from their barracks in
East Germany, Poland, and the western military districts of the Soviet Union to points around the periphery of Czechoslo vakia.
By the end of June, SIGINT and satellite reconnaissance revealed that the Soviets now had thirty-four combat divisions deployed
along the Czech border, and that the Soviets were rapidly moving hundreds of combat aircraft to airfields within striking
distance of targets inside Czechoslo vakia. On July 17, SIGINT detected the first signs that the Soviet military had begun
mobilizing its forces in the western USSR for a potential invasion of Czech oslo vakia. Three days later NSA reported that
a newly activated high-level Soviet headquarters was now operating inside the Soviet military bunker complex at Legnica in
southern Poland. On August 3 and 4, NSA listening posts detected the movement of large numbers of Soviet, East German, and
Polish troops to the Czech border, and further large-scale troop movements were detected within the Soviet Baltic and Belorussian
Military Districts toward the Polish and Czech borders.
⁵⁹
But sadly, despite the numerous indicators turning up in SIGINT and from other intelligence sources, the CIA’s intelligence
analysts at Langley stuck by their judgment that the Soviets would not intervene militarily in Czech oslovaki a until after
a special meeting of the Czech Communist Party scheduled for September 9, 1968. As it turned out, the Kremlin had already
decided that they had to intervene before the Czech Party Congress meeting for fear that the gathering of Czech officials
might conceivably endorse a stronger anti-Soviet political platform than that already advocated by the Dubc?ek government.